How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.[Part].Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
"I done taught you all there is of this settled country," Sam said. "You can hunt it good as I can now. You are ready for the Big Bottom now, for bear and deer. Hunter's meat," he said. "Next year you will be ten. You will write your age in two numbers and you will be ready to become a man. Your pa [...] promised you can go with us then." (4.1.24)
Becoming a man requires venturing out of the settled country into unsettled wilderness (and eating bear and deer meat, of course). Isaac has learned how to hunt on settled land, but only in the wilderness can you become a man.
Quote #2
It was only the boy who returned, returning solitary and alone to the settled familiar land, to follow for eleven months the childish business of rabbits and such while he waited to go back, having brought with him, even from his brief sojourn, an unforgettable sense of the big woods--not a quality dangerous or particularly inimical, but profound, sentient, gigantic and brooding, amid which he had been permitted to go to and fro at will, unscathed, why he knew not, but dwarfed and, until he had drawn honorably blood worthy of being drawn, alien. (4.1.29)
This is our first glimpse of Isaac's awe for the wilderness and the sense that he wants to be part of something bigger than himself. We can see that this boy's gonna grow up to have some pretty big ideas.
Quote #3
He had already relinquished, of his will, because of his need, in humility and peace and without regret yet apparently that had not been enough, the leaving of the gun was not enough. He stood for a moment--a child, alien and lost in the green and soaring gloom of the markless wilderness. Then he relinquished completely to it. It was the watch and the compass. He was still tainted. He removed the linked chain of the one and the looped thong of the other from his overalls and hung them on a bush and leaned the stick beside them and entered it. (5.1.39)
Isaac realizes in this scene that any man-made tool (even a stick) "taints" him. If he is to have a real encounter with wilderness, which the bear symbolizes, he must let go of everything that marks him as being civilized and therefore not a part of the wilderness. The watch and compass foreshadow the later, more destructive, technologies that drive a wedge between man and nature.
Quote #4
[…] and not Sam: not held fast in earth but free in earth and not in earth but of earth, myriad yet undiffused of every myriad part, leaf and twig and particle, air and sun and rain and dew and night, acorn oak and leaf and acorn again, dark and dawn and dawn again in their immutable progression, and, being myriad, one […] (5.5.30)
This is the ultimate relationship of man and nature. Isaac visits the place where Sam's buried and realizes that Sam's body and spirit are part of nature now. It's all one thing. This is one of those "aha!" moments for Isaac.
Quote #5
But that time was gone now. Now they went in cars, driving faster and faster each year because the roads were better and they had farther and farther to drive, the territory in which game still existed drawing yearly inward as his life was drawing inward, until now he was the last of those who had once made the journey in wagons without feeling it and now those who accompanied him were the sons and even grandsons of the men who had ridden for twenty four hours in the sleet behind the steaming mules. (6.2)
This, as it turns out, is what Sam was trying to avert when teaching Isaac to hunt in a manner that respects nature. Over-hunting, logging, large-scale agriculture and industrialization have decimated the old wilderness in the South. They now have to drive far, and even then, the game is scarce.
Quote #6
The old man relaxed again. He watched, as he did each recurrent November while more than sixty of them passed, the land which he had seen change. At first there had been only the old towns along the River and the old towns along the hills, from each of which the planters with their gangs of slaves and then of hired laborers had wrested from the impenetrable jungle of water-standing cane and cypress, gum and holly and oak and ash, cotton patches which as the years passed became fields and then plantations. The paths made by deer and bear became roads and then highways, with towns in turn springing up along them... (6.22)
So the decimation of the wilderness has happened all within Isaac's lifetime, over just sixty years. Also, the idea that farmland had to be carved out of the wilderness is a strange notion for the younger generation who have inherited the settled land and have no conception of what it took for that land to be settled.
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.