The Search

I bought the book Into the Wild last winter for a friend for Christmas, peeked at it over a glass of water and chocolate chips, and was immediately enamored. I read that book constantly, trying to finish it before I had to give it to him. It was kind of an afterthought, the book--I'd already bought his present, but had seen someone reading the book, thought of him, and found myself at Barnes and Nobles two hours later--so I didn't have much time. I was literally reading it until the moment I stuck the last piece of tape on the red wrapping paper. It was so good.

I am a bit of a hypochondriac. If someone has a headache and says so, I have one, too. I like to think of it as a very keen sense of empathy, but I deep down I know it's just me being pathetic. When I read about the "call of the west," I could literally feel my heart going out, too. The book was messing with my mind, and monumentally. It drove me nuts not being able to talk to Paul about it-- secrets make me miserable. And they made him miserable, too.

"Can I just have a clue?" he begged.

"Alright. It will make you...itchy."

"Itchy?"

"Yes."

"Then I know where I'll open it!"

"Where?"

"Over your bed!"

But it wasn't that kind of itch. I've heard of people getting itchy feet, needing to move, to travel. It was my mind that had begun to itch. The book is essentially a biography about a boy named Alex who in the sixties decided to give away all his money, abandon his car, and head for Alaska. He dies. But the story in between leaving and being found by moose hunters in an abandoned bus is absolutely wonderful. Along with Alex's tale, though, the author threads a few stories of other explorers, revolutionaries, and whackjobs with similar aspirations--and endings--throughout. One in particular resonated with me. It was about a man who'd killed himself on a search for beauty. He was a beauty-seeker, and this reckless love eventually found him dead on a mountain. And it was then I realized--my life has been a search for beauty, too. And moreover, a search for truth.

And what better time to contemplate the differences between the two than summer, when beauty and deception mix fluidly as money and spray tans. What is beauty? The man in the book found beauty in nature--indeed, most of the people mentioned seemed to have found little time for sex, having found something so much higher--but certainly there is beauty in people, too. But where is it?

I was distressed to hear a boy in my government class say that adolescence was the only time a person was attractive, using this as an argument for tanning, despite the risks. "You only look good once!" he said. "After twenty, you know--it's all down from here. May as well look good while you can!"

I don't say much in government (what is left to be said?) but I turned on him now. "You don't think that people are beautiful, simply because they're people?" I asked. "You don't think that people in their seventies are beautiful, just because they're breathing?" He looked at me strangely. I couldn't stop myself, now, though. "I'm astounded everyday how gorgeous people are, just because they're alive. Life is beauty." I was getting awkwardly passionate, so another boy--one I'd thought to be more mature than this--came to his friend's defense. "Well, technically yes, but...."

But what? There is truth in age, truth in nature, truth in wrinkles and unwashed hair. When I was in Peru, I saw truth everywhere-- and beauty was always with it. There was beauty in the children, who had no shoes, beauty in the eyes of their mothers as they watched them play. More often than not it was a painful beauty. But it was beauty nonetheless, because it was simple, genuine, raw and real.

That's what I've been realizing lately. Truth is beauty. Real beauty is truth. And I'll be searching for both the rest of my life.