Nick Irving > Recent Status Updates

Fear is a lack of control, realized. Not the absence of control itself, but the understanding of it. The true, stomach-churning grasping of the fact that we have no significant way to affect what comes next in a given situation.

Fear is a lack of control, realized.

A spirit of gloom seemed to rise from the shadowed declivity, from the silence of the mournful wood and the damp darkness of the leaf-hidden earth.
. . .
I found myself in a loneliness indescribable and terrible.
. . .
Humanity was not so much absent as gone, and a feeling of doom and death was in the motionless air, which lay like a weight upon leaf and flower.

The adventures of Porter here were as strange and romantic as those of any of the hundreds of the gypsies of the sea who sailed this tropical and spilled the blood of a people unused to their ways and ignorant of their inventions and weapons of power.

Grief never really leaves you, but at some point it becomes remembered rather than enveloping.

The oldest argument for doing something wrong is that everyone is doing it. To dismantle what they have built would have required the agreement of every man who had spent his life building it.
. . .
A society cannot make a man a monster, Diago. But it can give him the excuse to become one.

Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work.

But despite the relative proximity is the bus to civilization, for all practical purposes McCandless was cut off from the rest of the world. He spent nearly four months in the bush all told, and during that period he didn’t encounter another living soul. In the end the Sushana River site was sufficiently remote enough to cost him his life.

Wilderness appealed to those bored or disgusted with man and his works. It not only offered an escape from society but also was an ideal stage for the Romantic individual to exercise the cult that he frequently made of his own soul. The solitude and total freedom of the wilderness created the perfect setting for either melancholy or exultation.

I was stirred by the dark mystery of mortality. I couldn’t resist stealing up to the edge of doom and peering over the brink. The hint of what was concealed in those shadows terrified me, but I caught sight of something in the glimpse, some forbidden and elemental riddle…

The danger [of climbing] bathed the world in a halogen glow that causes everything - the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds - to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.

Let the rest of mankind find me if it could.

“Someday the priest will be alone here without a flock.”

The grinding, dusty haul up the Alaska Highway was Chris’s first visit to the Far North. [He] had been smitten by the vastness of the land, by the ghostly hue of the glaciers, by the pellucid subarctic sky. There was never any question that he would return.

Chris invented this [cross-country] workout he called Road Warriors… The whole idea was to lose our bearings, to push ourselves into unknown territory. Then we’d run at a slightly slower pace until we found a road we recognized and race home again at full speed. In a certain sense that’s how Chris lived his entire life.

It is enough that I am surrounded with beauty…

I now walk into the wild.

The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched.

The trip was to be an odyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would change everything.

I now walk into the wild.
. . .
Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people who think the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in their lives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope or longing.

And he put the heels of his palms against his eyes. A sound came out of him, but it wasn’t a sob. It was a laugh. The most terrible fucked up laugh I ever heard.

He was giving me that wide blue stare of his: twenty-twenty vision that saw everything and understood practically nothing.

Darkness comes.
. . .

The crescent moon is enough to paint the hilltops silver and black. I can see clear across the sweep of the valley ahead. There’s nothing out there. No movement for miles. Just the vast, quiet emptiness of the moors.

For just a moment, everything had felt okay again in the world.

We looked like young gods. We looked like we would live forever.

Christ, it’s all getting to you, I thought. Making you paranoid.
. . .
It’s funny the things you remember - and forget.

Our tack was toward the eastern distance, and no glimpse of land or cloud made us aught but solitary travelers in illimitable space. The sun was beneath the deep, but in the hush of the pale light one felt the awe of its coming.

Sleep was a long time coming.

The way things were looking, it was going to be a long game.

Money can’t buy happiness, but it allows one to endure unhappiness in relative comfort.