Excerpts from "Into the Wild"

It started out as a magazine assignment but turned into an obsessive need to find out more about the young man who reminded the author of himself. This list is based on Jon Krakauer's note to the reader and his memories of climbing the Thumb.

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. parallel
    something analogous to something else
    I was haunted by the particulars of the boy's starvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and those in my own.
  2. peregrination
    traveling or wandering around
    Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing the convoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details of his peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession.
  3. impartial
    free from undue bias or preconceived opinions
    I won't claim to be an impartial biographer.
  4. dispassionate
    unaffected by strong emotion or prejudice
    McCandless's strange tale struck a personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible.
  5. oblique
    slanting or inclined in direction or course or position
    I do so in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigma of Chris McCandless.
  6. fulminate
    criticize severely
    some readers admired the boy immensely for his courage and noble ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, a wacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity
  7. medley
    a musical composition consisting of a series of songs
    Like McCandless, figures of male authority aroused in me a confusing medley of corked hurt and hunger to please.
  8. zeal
    excessive fervor to do something or accomplish some end
    If something captured my undisciplined imagination, I pursued it with a zeal bordering on obsession, and from the age of seventeen until my late twenties that something was mountain climbing.
  9. abyss
    a bottomless gulf or pit
    Early on a difficult climb, especially a difficult solo climb, you constantly feel the abyss pulling at your back.
  10. tentative
    hesitant or lacking confidence; unsettled in mind or opinion
    The siren song of the void puts you on edge; it makes your movements tentative, clumsy, herky-jerky.
  11. clarity
    the quality of being coherent and easily understood
    The accumulated clutter of day-to-day existence--the lapses of conscience, the unpaid bills, the bungled opportunities, the dust under the couch, the inescapable poison of your genes--all of it is temporarily forgotten, crowded from your thoughts by an overpowering clarity of purpose and by the seriousness of the task at hand.
  12. obscure
    not clearly understood or expressed
    I was a raw youth who mistook passion for insight and acted according to an obscure, gap-riddled logic.
  13. lofty
    of high moral or intellectual value
    As a young man, I was unlike McCandless in many important regards; most notably, I possessed neither his intellect nor his lofty ideals.
  14. agitation
    the feeling of being uncalm
    And I suspect we had a similar intensity, a similar heedlessness, a similar agitation of the soul.
  15. hubris
    overbearing pride or presumption
    Eighteen years after the event, I now recognize that I suffered from hubris, perhaps, and an appalling innocence, certainly, but I wasn't suicidal.
Created on Sun Nov 16 01:38:30 EST 2014 (updated Mon Nov 17 02:32:46 EST 2014)

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