How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #7
"God created man and he created the world for him to live in and I reckon He created the kind of world He would have wanted to live in if He had been a man—the ground to walk on, the big woods, the trees and the water, and the game to live in it. (6.57)
Well, we might have included us a Starbucks or two, but still, this sounds pretty good. Garden of Eden good, if you think about it. Isaac, Bible fanboy that he is, probably knows that farming only happened after Adam and Eve got thrown out of the garden and had to work the ground to eat. It was definitely a less awesome arrangement. But wilderness is even more perfect, because in the Garden, game wasn't "game"; there was no hunting allowed.
Quote #8
...Sam dipped his hands into the hot blood and marked his face forever while he stood trying not to tremble, humbly and with pride too though the boy of twelve had been unable to phrase it then: I slew you; my bearing must not shame your quitting life. My conduct forever onward must become your death; marking him for that and for more than that: that day and himself and McCaslin juxtaposed not against the wilderness but against the tamed land, the old wrong and shame itself, in repudiation and denial at least of the land and the wrong and shame even if he couldn't cure the wrong and eradicate the shame, who at fourteen when he learned of it had believed he could do both when he became competent and when at twenty-one he became competent he knew that he could do neither but at least he could repudiate the wrong and shame... (6.63)
An elderly Isaac remembers his initiation by Sam into adulthood. He is now able to put into words what he learned from Sam at the time. He's getting all cosmic on us. He understands that the most important part of Sam's lesson wasn't about respecting the wilderness, but understanding the price that was paid to turn the wilderness into cultivated land, and understanding how this was intimately connected to slavery.
Quote #9
... it was his land, although he had never owned a foot of it. He had never wanted to, not even after he saw plain its ultimate doom, watching it retreat year by year before the onslaught of axe and saw and log-lines and then dynamite and tractor plows, because it belonged to no man. It belonged to all; they had only to use it well, humbly and with pride. Then suddenly he knew why he had never wanted to own any of it, arrest at least that much of what people called progress, measure his longevity at least against that much of its ultimate fate. It was because there was just exactly enough of it. He seemed to see the two of them--himself and the wilderness--as coevals... (6.66)
Isaac feels a special oneness with the wilderness because he sees that it will probably disappear around the same time he dies. He can die knowing he didn't do anything to make "progress" happen.