Sebastian Junger’s career resembles, at times, an Indiana Jones movie. As a journalist he’s traveled to war zones in Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan–in that last country, he tracked down Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Taliban resistance, shortly before he was killed. He’s also immersed himself in often-harrowing vocations like smoke jumping and commercial fishing, the latter of which became the topic of his first book, The Perfect Storm. Junger says he first recognized his thirst for danger during his recovery from a brutal chainsaw accident, which happened on the job with a tree-trimming company. While his massive leg wound was healing, he mused about the pleasure he and others take in risky work, and decided to train his writer’s eye on people he described as “fools and heroes.” Despite his rakish good looks (George Clooney wished to star in an adaptation of one of his stories), Junger is self-deprecating enough that he’d put himself in the fool category, we think. He’s also quite earnest. He approached The Rake’s Desert Island challenge with the kind of intense seriousness he gives to his higher-stakes endeavors, and opted for an everyman’s second-person voice in presenting the five items he’d want to bring with him to the isle. “I’m reaching for some sort of human needs common to all of us, and not just to me,” he explained. So here’s what he–and we–could use:
1. No matter where you go, you need a good knife. Not a folding knife, because over a lifetime it will break. Without a knife, you feel powerless, exposed, and vulnerable, and you have no tool to change your world with.
2. You need a mirror, because over a lifetime you will forget what you look like, and that will be a fundamental loss of identity that you cannot afford if you are alone. It is also good for signaling passing airplanes.
3. You cannot live without music, so you would bring a guitar–which you don’t know how to play, because I hear it takes a lifetime to learn guitar. That way you will be well-engaged with something until you die.
4. If you’re like me, you’re an atheist, but you’re from a Christian culture. You will therefore bring the Bible because you will finally have enough time to read it and maybe figure out what wisdom it may contain. Religion aside, it contains a multitude of stories and maybe those would keep you stimulated over the course of the coming decades.
5. Finally, you will bring a photograph of your family or your wife or your best friend or maybe all of them together–the people you love, the people without whom you would feel lonely even in a city of ten million.
Sebastian Junger presents “Myths and Legends, the Stories that Haunt Us,” a free-form storytelling event at which he will spin tales about all manner of disasters and monsters. Topics are slated to include the Titanic, the Loch Ness Monster, the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Boston Strangler. April 22 at the Fitzgerald Theater, 10 Exchange St. E., St. Paul; 651-290-1221; www.mpr.org
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