Description
Named one of the most best books of the year by Slate, Chicago Tribune, Entropy Magazine, and named one of the most top 10 memoirs by Library Journal
Into the Wild meets Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—a lyrical memoir of a life changed instantly and of the perilous beauty of attempting to find identity in solitude
On a clear May afternoon on the end of his junior year at Harvard, Howard Axelrod played a pick-up game of basketball. In a skirmish for a loose ball, a boy’s finger hooked at the back of Axelrod’s eyeball and left him permanently blinded in his right eye. A week later, he returned to the similar dorm room, but to a different world. A world where nothing looked solid, where the distance between how people saw him and how he saw had widened into a gulf. Desperate for a sense of orientation he could believe, he retreated to a jerry-rigged house in the Vermont woods, where he lived without a pc or tv, and in large part without human contact, for two years. He needed to find, away from society’s pressures and rush, a sense of meaning that couldn’t be changed instantly.