Wild Animus By Rich Shapero

The Magic of Love

Wild Animus tracks the obsessive quest of Ransom Altman, who, on leaving college, rejects a normal life, vowing instead to live—with his girlfriend Lindy—in a world of “inexhaustible desire.”

Rich says of his protagonist: “It’s a unique time for most of us. That period between 15 and 21 years of age. We discover what the magic of love is about, and what surrender is about. Ransom is making that discovery, and he arrives at some extreme conclusions.”

One of these conclusions is that being in love is like being chased by a pack wolves:

“The notion that in love there is an element of self-destruction—a yielding up of the self in order to realize a participation in something greater—is familiar to many of us. Ransom perceives that if there’s going to be surrender between two individuals, then there will be a hunter and hunted. He develops a mythos around that, and tries to live it out.”

A Human-centric View

In order to do that, Ransom and Lindy head north to the Alaskan wilderness—and an encounter with the hidden depths of the human heart.

“Wilderness is the place where superficialities are stripped away and what’s fundamental rises to the surface.

“In the wilds, you can get a visceral sense of what the world was like before human civilization arose. The big mammals are important. The breadth of scale is important, especially in the mountains. At your feet, you see tundra plants that are miniscule. Then you look up at icefalls that rise a mile into the sky, or ranges that stretch as far as the eye can see.

“Everything in our urban world is human-sized. That fools us into a human-centric view of creation. The Alaskan wilds are a great antidote for that.”