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Essay / Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer and How to... by Tim O'Brien
People attempt to understand the world through the perception of the experiences they encounter. These encounters involve either experiencing the experience first-hand or passing on the experience through another person. Our perception eliminates the main ideas of these experiences as realistic and, if so, qualifies them as truths. However, our perception of the truth obtained from these experiences is not always credible because, as the recipient, we are limited to the amount of experiences we can retain. This means that perceptions of labeled truths are the result of our translation of incomplete experiences into a new perception resulting from what he or she might retain from the original experience. These incomplete experiences give rise to new truths, shown in Chris McCandless's study of Alaska's trip from Jon Krakauer's "Selections from Into the Wild." Many have argued the motivations for McCandless's escape from society because readers translated McCandless's experiences differently due to the lack of all of his experiences in his journal. These translated experiences formed a variety of truths but they did not convince Krakauer, so he traveled the very mountains that McCandless traveled in an attempt to retain the same experiences as McCandless. Krakauer was not successful, but during his journey he retained different experiences and led him to translate them into new truths. However, these various truths are all linked to one main idea that allows them to be truths, this is explained in "How to Tell a War Story" by Tim O'Brien. O'Brien observed, when trying to tell his war stories, that alterations would appear when he told them, but he found that this did not make the altered stories false because they retained the same basis or idea of war. experience unchanged. of paper... or it is translated. It is through this relationship that we infer experiences to understand truths about the world. Each person's perception identifies the truths hidden in experiences, but because of our perspective, we will never be able to fully perceive an experience. However, ultimately, it is impossible for an idea to be fully true, but our minds label it as true so that we are not always confused by the encounters in our daily lives. Labeling truth on ideas is a temporary solution, because truth is constantly changing because we are always learning new partial truths from the missed insights of experiences. Additionally, by sharing ideas by conveying experiences, more truths about a certain experience can be discovered, but we can never understand the whole truth. Works Cited Krakauer, Jon. “Selections from Into the Wild” O'Brien, Tim. "How to tell a war story”