I recently finished reading Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer. I’ll see the movie when it comes out on DVD. [It's not currently playing in a theater near me -- even if it were, I rarely go to the theaters any more....]
The book is primarily the story of Chris McCandless, a young man that, after graduating from college, shunned his family and most of society to travel alone mostly in western North America ending up in Alaska. Krakauer adds a chapter on one of his own early adventures making a solo climb in Alaska and information on a few other [in]famous figures that lived on the fringes of society.
At one point McCandless writes,
…nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.
I can identify with some of the yearning that McCandless felt for a more genuine, more deliberate existence and the desire for solitude. But I take it in smaller doses. I don’t want to be a hunter/gatherer — I’ve never been hunting and I’d probably starve before I killed and cleaned everything I eat. Still, I think we have gotten too far removed from the sources of our food and, as a result, we fail to appreciate our food or the hard work of the people that provide it. Also, I need a lot of time alone. Fortuitously, I can get a lot of that without escaping to the bush.
But the allure is there….
Posted by Tim
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I had a playlist all planned for this week and then was reminded that today is the anniversary of the plane crash in 1959 that claimed the lives of Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and The Big Bopper. It was tempting to change to a playlist of a song from each of them… but I’m sticking with my original plan.
One of my favorite discs is Dar Williams’ Mortal City. [I wrote about her song The Christians and the Pagans back here and here too.] Her song February is one of the saddest songs I know. And the last time I listened to it I thought, “I should put that in a 3-SP… and February is coming up soon.” So here we are.
Don McLean is best known for his American Pie disc which contains Vincent and American Pie [the latter about the plane crash mentioned above. Don't ask me why that didn't make me remember that the anniversary was coming up.] But my favorite song on that disc is another really sad one, Empty Chairs, that I used in a post back here.
It was pretty easy for me to decide that those two songs should be in this list, but I had a hard time deciding what to use for the third. There are just too many sad songs that I love. [Sometimes I can't think of a third that fits my theme so I have several playlist ideas with only two songs in them. Maybe I should do a series of 2-SPs with a third less fewer songs than our regular playlists....] And then I heard You Don’t Know Me by Ray Charles on the radio last week. “Ah,” I thought, “That’s it.”
The videos aren’t great, so just close your eyes or cry or something and enjoy the songs.
The song titles link to YouTube videos and the artist names link to their official web sites.
