David Rakoff

Why wasn’t David Rakoff delighted about the prospect of being exiled to a desert island, even a fantasy one? After all, the Canadian-born writer and actor said “OK” when Outside magazine asked him to take “an intense, weeklong wilderness course, where I was trained in primitive skills such as animal tracking, skinning, shelter construction, and the like” (the resulting essay later appeared in his first book, Fraud). Then there was the twenty-day fast, “where one is supposed to just credulously let go and put one’s trust in the lack of food to effect its wonderful magic in releasing toxins and making you feel better than you ever thought possible.” About this experience, he told a story as thought-provoking as it was hilarious on the public-radio program This American Life.

Rakoff also asserted that “on some level I am the perfect person for a game like this. I am deeply concerned with self-sufficiency, even though I can’t drive. I cut my own hair, I recently made my own jeans, I made all the lamps in my apartment, and my freezer is full of bags of animal carcasses suitable for boiling down into stock as needed.”

So what was the problem? Thoroughly confusing us, Rakoff finally admitted, “I am terrible at stuff like this”—not at being exiled to a desert island, that is, but at selecting just five things to take along. Probably it’s his intensely inquisitive nature. For example, during his fast, he had so many questions that his “guru, a man who through his own constant spiritual questing was a paragon of inner peace and enlightenment, a man who was by his own admission a personal friend to His Holiness the Dalai Lama, became openly abusive, and I, for one, can hardly blame him.”

Things began to make sense. If Rakoff seems kind of neurotically self-analytical, not to mention self-contradictory and perhaps a tad self-loathing—well, remember, he is a writer. Also, he lives in New York.

Then there’s his obsession with time travel. Apparently he ruminates “at least once a day” on how he would have been “just as useless a member of society” five hundred years ago as he is now. “I don’t know how to make a light bulb or an electrical circuit or a pill,” he said. “I wouldn’t even seem smart or modern enough to be burned as a witch. I’m not joking. I really do think about this daily and use it as an excuse to feel bad about myself.”

That’s when we felt it was necessary to tell Rakoff to buck up. He did so immediately and, in a “penitential spirit,” came up with the following to pack in his desert-island kit bag:

1. My bowdrill supplies, those wooden implements I carved at wilderness camp, by which I can make fire using nothing more than sticks and some downy vegetable matter like dried grass. (I really can make fire with this. It’s far and away the coolest thing I can do. Children who have seen me do this have never gotten over it.)

2. A good carbon steel hunting knife.

3. A whetstone for that knife.

4. Plastic sheeting, preferably opaque, for constructing weatherproof shelter and for stretching over a hole in the ground and gathering the resulting condensation for drinking water.

5. Finally, Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust, a work I have never read and likely will never get to. Only so that when eventually, in that arid and neglected place, those who come after me might look from those pages (now yellowing and curled like dead leaves) to my sun-bleached bones, and think to themselves, What a waste. Of course, they will be wrong.

Rakoff will be the featured guest at the Friends of the Minneapolis Public Library’s annual meeting on October 3; for tickets call 612-630-6155, or visit www.friendsofmpl.org. Don’t Get Too Comfortable, Rakoff’s latest collection of essays, is available in paperback on September 12.