transcendent                         sonorous (4)                          plebian(18)                 unencumbered (22)

asceticism                             meandered (5)           nomadic(19)                     

unsullied (4)                          cursory (13)                  altruistic (19) 

1.What words of wisdom do you have scrawled in your bedroom?  On your refrigerator?  On your notebook cover?  In your car?  Write one down.

2.       What does Alaska represent to our country?  To you?
3. What is the relationship between nature and American identity?
4. What would a successful life look like for you?
5. What do you notice about the picture of the young man? Read the picture? What inferences can you make?
Transcendentalist writers like Thoroeau and Whitman were among a handful of authors who had a profound impact on McCandless.  A brief intro to the genesis of Transcedentalism is the following: 

In the 1830s, Ralph Waldo Emerson, a prominent Unitarian minister, left the church to seek a more meaningful religious experience. Emerson argued that individuals could discover truth and God within themselves without belonging to a church or holding to a particular set of religious beliefs. He began to lecture and write about religion and the world, and formed a discussion group with other men and women who had also broken from the church. This group of people accepted Emerson’s idea that truth “transcends” (or goes beyond) what people observe with their senses in the physical world. They called their group the Transcendental Club, and soon they established a new religious, philosophical, and literary movement. At first focusing on the “inner self,” many Transcendentalists later became involved in social reform. And so Transcendentalism was born.

In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds...A nation of men will for the first time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which also inspires all men."

HW: Read the Author's Note: chapters 1-3 (3-23)