"Where I Lived and What I Lived For"

Excerpted from "Walden," the essay by Henry David Thoreau explains why he went to live in the woods.

Here are all the word lists to support the reading of Grade 11 Unit 4's texts from SpringBoard's Common Core ELA series: Self-Reliance, Where I Lived, poems about transcendental thinking, All I Really Need to Know, Into the Wild (excerpts), Into the Wild, A View from Mount Ritter, multi-genre research project sample, Sparky, Charles M. Schulz
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Full list of words from this list:

words only definitions & notes
  1. saturate
    infuse or fill completely
    The upright white hewn studs and freshly planed door and window casings gave it a clean and airy look, especially in the morning, when its timbers were saturated with dew
  2. exude
    release in drops or small quantities
    so that I fancied that by noon some sweet gum would exude from them
  3. extensive
    large in spatial extent or range or scope or quantity
    I was seated by the shore of a small pond, about a mile and a half south of the village of Concord and somewhat higher than it, in the midst of an extensive wood between that town and Lincoln
  4. Aurora
    goddess of the dawn; counterpart of Greek Eos
    I have been as sincere a worshiper of Aurora as the Greeks.
  5. requiem
    a song or hymn of mourning as a memorial to a dead person
    It was Homer's requiem
  6. wrath
    intense anger
    itself an Iliad and Odyssey in the air, singing its own wrath and wanderings
  7. somnolence
    a very sleepy state
    Then there is least somnolence in us, and for an hour, at least, some part of us awakes which slumbers all the rest of the day and night.
  8. Veda
    (from the Sanskrit word for `knowledge') any of the most ancient sacred writings of Hinduism written in early Sanskrit; traditionally believed to comprise the Samhitas, the Brahmanas, the Aranyakas, and the Upanishads
    The Vedas say, "All intelligences awake with the morning."
  9. emit
    express audibly; utter sounds
    All poets and heroes, like Memnon, are the children of Aurora, and emit their music at sunrise.
  10. forsake
    leave someone who needs or counts on you; leave in the lurch
    We must learn to reawaken and keep ourselves awake, not by mechanical aids, but by an infinite expectation of the dawn, which does not forsake us in our soundest sleep.
  11. contemplation
    a calm, lengthy, intent consideration
    Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.
  12. deliberately
    with intention; in an intentional manner
    I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
  13. rout
    an overwhelming defeat
    I wanted to live deep, and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life
  14. sublime
    of high moral or intellectual value
    and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion
  15. glorify
    praise or honor
    For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."
  16. evitable
    capable of being avoided or warded off
    Still we live meanly, like ants; though the fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes; it is error upon error, and clout upon clout, and our best virtue has for its occasion a superfluous and evitable wretchedness.
  17. dead reckoning
    navigation without the aid of celestial observations
    a man has to live, if he would not founder and go to the bottom and not make his port at all, by dead reckoning, and he must be a great calculator indeed who succeeds
  18. spartan
    unsparing and uncompromising in discipline or judgment
    the only cure for it, as for them, is in a rigid economy, a stern and more than Spartan simplicity of life and elevation of purpose
  19. sleeper
    one of the cross braces that support the rails on a railway
    If we do not get out sleepers, and forge rails and devote days and nights to the work, but go to tinkering upon our lives to improve them, who will build railroads?
  20. discern
    perceive, recognize, or detect
    Children, who play life, discern its true law and relations more clearly than men, who fail to live it worthily, but who think that they are wiser by experience, that is, by failure...
Created on Sun Nov 16 01:22:30 EST 2014 (updated Mon Nov 17 01:45:02 EST 2014)

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