Into The Wild Chapter 4 Work

​Into The Wild Chapter 4 Work

Classwork​

​TRANSCENDENTAL ALLUSIONS

​Chapter 4

Chapter 4 contains various allusions to Transcendental works. Read each provided excerpt in order to analyze each allusion.

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​Read

Emerson’s Nature

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“To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society… Standing on the bare ground, — my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, — all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, — master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. In the wilderness, I find something more dear and connate than in streets or villages. In the tranquil landscape, and especially in the distant line of the horizon, man beholds somewhat as beautiful as his own nature. The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister, is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable. I am not alone and unacknowledged. They nod to me, and I to them. The waving of the boughs in the storm, is new to me and old. It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. Its effect is like that of a higher thought or a better emotion coming over me, when I deemed I was thinking justly or doing right.”

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​Read

Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"

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"I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was put into a jail once on this account, for one night; and, as I stood considering the walls of solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron grating which strained the light, I could not help being struck with the foolishness of that institution which treated my as if I were mere flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I wondered that it should have concluded at length that this was the best use it could put me to, and had never thought to avail itself of my services in some way. I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to climb or break through before they could get to be as free as I was. I did nor for a moment feel confined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my townsmen had paid my tax. They plainly did not know how to treat me, but behaved like persons who are underbred. In every threat and in every compliment there was a blunder; for they thought that my chief desire was to stand the other side of that stone wall. I could not but smile to see how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous. As they could not reach me, they had resolved to punish my body… Thus the state never intentionally confronts a man's sense, intellectual or moral, but only his body, his senses. It is not armed with superior with or honesty, but with superior physical strength. I was not born to be forced. I will breathe after my own fashion. Let us see who is the strongest. What force has a multitude? They only can force me who obey a higher law than I. They force me to become like themselves. I do not hear of men being forced to live this way or that by masses of men. What sort of life were that to live? When I meet a government which says to me, "Your money or your life," why should I be in haste to give it my money? It may be in a great strait, and not know what to do: I cannot help that. It must help itself; do as I do. It is not worth the while to snivel about it. I am not responsible for the successful working of the machinery of society…"

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​Read

Tolstoy and Thoreau Quotes on Money

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​From Tolstoy’s The Complete Works of Count Tolstoy: “The dissemination of money, or credit, and of all kinds of monetary tokens more and more confirms this meaning of money. Money is the possibility or the right to exploit the labours of others. Money is a new form of slavery, which differs from the old only in being impersonal, and in freeing people from all the human relations of the slave.”

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From Thoreau’s Walden: “Rather than love, than money, than fame, give me truth.”

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Open Ended

How does this excerpt reflect McCandless’s journey?

USE COMPLETE SENTENCES

“To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims and exiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeutic and spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality.” PAUL SHEPARD, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature

Open Ended

What does Krakauer mean by an “Emersonian high”? Explain.

USE COMPLETE SENTENCES

“The Datsun, of course, belonged to Chris McCandless. After piloting it west out of Atlanta, he’d arrived in Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6, riding a giddy Emersonian high.”

Open Ended

What does this allusion reveal about McCandless? Explain.

USE COMPLETE SENTENCES

“McCandless could endeavor to explain that he answered to statutes of a higher order— that as a latter-day adherent of Henry David Thoreau, he took as gospel the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and thus considered it his moral responsibility to flout the laws of the state.”

Open Ended

Why does McCandless burn his money, and why would it make Thoreau/Tolstoy proud?

USE COMPLETE SENTENCES

“Then, in a gesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud, he arranged all his paper currency in a pile on the sand—a pathetic little stack of ones and fives and twenties—and put a match to it. One hundred twenty-three dollars in legal tender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke.”

Open Ended

How does this allusion reflect McCandless’s journey?

USE COMPLETE SENTENCES

“He was alone,” as James Joyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded, happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and willful and wildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and the seaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.”