“He was alone,” as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brakish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangles and veiled grey sunlight” (Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild, p. 31)