What if I were smiling and running into your arms? Would you see then what I see now? - Jon Krakauer

I read somewhere... how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong... to measure yourself at least once.

"You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent," Westerberg reflects, draining his third drink. "He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybe part of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimes he tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were bad to each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake to get too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always had to know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing."

Unlike Muir and Thoreau, McCandless went into the wilderness not primarily to ponder nature or the world at large but, rather, to explore the inner country of his own soul.