He met many kind people, but he could never BE with them. For people who have undergone great terror at an early age, there is always a place which does not reach out and connect, which CANNOT reach out and connect. The loss of social identity and place is the defining feature of trauma. The social sense, instinctual social sense, is displaced by the need for survival. He thought that somehow if he could survive some great ordeal that the path back home would be opened. That he would surmount his fundamental isolation, which he felt even with his sister.
For the attentive, it is not so hard to see why people are crazy, why most all of us are crazy. The question is what to do with this knowledge.
For myself, it is a twofold question. On the one hand, on an abstract level–the level where I find what peace I find, most of the time–it is how to help humanity. This is where Tolstoy (and all intellectual “Humanitarians”) lived. But this is an effort to achieve an end–reconnection–which cannot be achieved in the abstract. Such people are mad, but appear saintly. The two are often–likely usually–confused. Saints are those who speak the right words while wrestling with–and failing to surmount–quite ordinary demons. This is why Lao Tzu counseled us to renounce sainthood.
The more important question is how to bring deep relaxation into these troubled place, how to find genuine peace. I have learned to sleep at night, but I still often shake. My journey will continue.
As far as McCandless, I feel he found peace in the end. I agree with his sister, that he did what he felt he had to. Where does one turn for genuine wisdom in this world?
For a start, I personally look to the work of Peter Levine, and Lawrence Heller and Aline LaPierre.
Most of modern literature: fucking useless.
Actually, I would add Kum Nye. It is a great practice. I cannot speak to why it has not been better propagated, why it languishes in obscurity compared to inferior practices we can find prominently displayed in every bookstore.