Going Away: the Dominant Strategy
Going away: The Dominant Strategy
Humans often question their reality. We share a common, physical reality and create mental realities within ourselves; these mentally created worlds are purely in our heads and can only be entered by the individuals who created them. Upon entering their mental reality, a person can experience what appears on the outside to look like a detachment from the common physical reality; they cannot consciously function in two realities simultaneously. Some people experience these detachments only briefly, and live most of their lives mentally focused on the physical reality. In “When I woke up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday,” Martha Stout attempts to explain the excessive mental detachment a number of her therapy patients experience, and the reasons for their prolonged escapes to their mental realities. In his Selection From Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer investigates the travels of a man named Chris McCandless, attempting to explain McCandless’s decision to escape into the Alaskan wilderness in an attempt to go as far away from modern civilization as possible. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that one’s senses have great effects on their interpretation of the reality they are in; his argument brings up the question of whether both author’s escapees did not simply feel a lack of belonging to the realities they were originally in, and therefore decided to escape. “Going away” is the escape method an individual uses to move from consciously being in an unsatisfying reality to being in a different, fulfilling one.s
To understand this concept, we must first understand what a reality is. A reality is a unique set of surroundings one perceives around them. Pallasmaa describes how cities around the world have unique auras, claiming, “Every city has its spectrum of tastes and odors” (293). Pallasmaa’s declaration implies that during travel, one can determine when he has left one place he was in and entered a new one based on a change in the atmosphere
Humans often question their reality. We share a common, physical reality and create mental realities within ourselves; these mentally created worlds are purely in our heads and can only be entered by the individuals who created them. Upon entering their mental reality, a person can experience what appears on the outside to look like a detachment from the common physical reality; they cannot consciously function in two realities simultaneously. Some people experience these detachments only briefly, and live most of their lives mentally focused on the physical reality. In “When I woke up Tuesday Morning, It was Friday,” Martha Stout attempts to explain the excessive mental detachment a number of her therapy patients experience, and the reasons for their prolonged escapes to their mental realities. In his Selection From Into the Wild, Jon Krakauer investigates the travels of a man named Chris McCandless, attempting to explain McCandless’s decision to escape into the Alaskan wilderness in an attempt to go as far away from modern civilization as possible. Juhani Pallasmaa argues that one’s senses have great effects on their interpretation of the reality they are in; his argument brings up the question of whether both author’s escapees did not simply feel a lack of belonging to the realities they were originally in, and therefore decided to escape. “Going away” is the escape method an individual uses to move from consciously being in an unsatisfying reality to being in a different, fulfilling one.s
To understand this concept, we must first understand what a reality is. A reality is a unique set of surroundings one perceives around them. Pallasmaa describes how cities around the world have unique auras, claiming, “Every city has its spectrum of tastes and odors” (293). Pallasmaa’s declaration implies that during travel, one can determine when he has left one place he was in and entered a new one based on a change in the atmosphere