The Call of the Wild

I read The Call of the Wild during a week where I wasn’t really sleeping.

Not the dramatic kind of insomnia you see in movies. Nothing poetic about it. Just lying awake at 2 a.m. with too many thoughts moving around in my chest like restless animals. The apartment felt too quiet. My phone felt loud even when it wasn’t ringing. And for some reason, I kept reaching for old books instead of new ones.

Maybe because old books feel less demanding.

They don’t ask you to keep up.

I found my copy of The Call of the Wild shoved between other paperbacks I’d forgotten I owned. The cover was bent. Pages yellowing a little at the edges. I think part of me expected it to feel childish now, like one of those stories adults romanticize because they read it young.

But that’s not what happened.

What happened was stranger.

I started reading about Buck — this strong, domesticated dog stolen from comfort and thrown into brutality — and something in me went painfully quiet.

Not because the story is subtle. It isn’t. Jack London writes like someone chopping wood: hard, cold, direct. There’s snow and violence and survival and hunger in almost every chapter. No softness around the edges.

And still… underneath all of it, there’s this ache.

This question humming through the whole book:

What part of ourselves survives when everything familiar is stripped away?

I didn’t expect that question to follow me around after I closed the book.

But it did.

I kept thinking about Buck changing slowly throughout the story. How he adapts not because he wants to, but because he has to. How the wild keeps calling something ancient out of him until eventually he doesn’t even recognize the life he came from.

And honestly, I think that scared me a little.

Because haven’t most of us felt that at some point?

Not the sled dogs and frozen wilderness part, obviously. But the feeling of becoming someone unfamiliar because life demanded it.

A breakup changes you.

Grief changes you.

Loneliness definitely changes you.

There are versions of yourself you can never really return to once survival enters the picture.

I think that’s why this book hit differently reading it as an adult.

When I was younger, I thought Buck becoming wild was empowering. Freedom. Instinct. Strength.

Now it feels more complicated than that.

Now it feels lonely.

There’s one night I remember while reading it. Rain tapping against the windows. I had the kitchen light on because the lamp in my living room stopped working weeks ago and I kept putting off replacing it. The whole apartment looked tired.

And I got to this part where Buck begins responding to something primal inside himself — something older than comfort, older than civilization — and I had to put the book down for a second.

Because I realized how exhausted I was from trying to be “civilized” all the time.

Polite all the time.

Available all the time.

Productive all the time.

There’s this weird pressure now to constantly optimize yourself into something smoother and easier for the world to consume.

And meanwhile, there are parts of us out in the cold somewhere, howling to be acknowledged.

That sounds dramatic, maybe. But I don’t know. The older I get, the more I think people carry secret wilderness inside them.

Not violence necessarily.

Just untamed truth.

The part that wants to disappear for a while. Turn the phone off. Stop performing. Stop pretending every exhausting thing is “fine.”

Buck stops pretending because survival won’t let him.

Humans usually keep pretending much longer.

That’s probably why the book feels strangely modern despite being over a century old. The setting is distant, but the emotional core isn’t.

Especially the brutality.

God, some parts are hard to read.

Not just because of the violence toward animals, though there’s plenty of that. It’s the constant reminder that the world can become merciless very quickly. Strength matters. Adaptation matters. And kindness, while beautiful, often feels fragile in harsh environments.

There’s a bleak honesty to that.

But there’s also something almost hypnotic about the way London describes instinct. As if beneath all our routines and technology and carefully constructed identities, there’s still an older version of humanity listening for something ancient in the dark.

I kept wondering while reading:

Do we spend our lives evolving away from ourselves?

Or trying to return?

Maybe both.

And maybe that’s why Buck’s transformation feels tragic and beautiful at the same time.

Because he loses something.

But he also becomes something.

I think people like to frame this book as an adventure story, and technically it is. There are fights, journeys, danger, survival. But reading it now felt less like adventure and more like watching identity dissolve in real time.

Not all at once.

Slowly.

Painfully.

The way life usually changes people.

There’s also this uncomfortable tension in the book that stayed with me after finishing it — the idea that love alone cannot always keep someone from becoming who they need to become.

John Thornton loves Buck. Truly loves him. And for a while, that love anchors him between two worlds.

But the call still comes.

That part hurt more than I remembered.

Because sometimes people love us deeply and still cannot hold onto us forever. Sometimes there are internal migrations happening no relationship can stop.

Have you ever felt that?

Like part of you was already leaving before your body caught up?

I think that’s what makes The Call of the Wild linger. It isn’t really about a dog becoming wild.

It’s about the terrifying pull toward authenticity.

And authenticity is rarely comfortable.

Sometimes it costs you the life you thought you wanted.

Sometimes it isolates you.

Sometimes it asks you to step into uncertainty without knowing who you’ll become on the other side.

By the time I finished the book, it was almost four in the morning.

The rain had stopped.

Everything felt strangely still.

I remember closing the book and just sitting there for a minute with this heavy feeling I couldn’t fully explain. Not sadness exactly. Not happiness either.

Just recognition.

Like the story had brushed against something in me I usually keep quiet.

Maybe that’s what great books do.

Not entertain you.

Not teach you.

Just gently expose the parts of yourself you’ve been avoiding.

And maybe the wild isn’t always a forest or frozen wilderness.

Maybe sometimes it’s simply the voice inside you asking whether the life you’re living actually belongs to you anymore.