I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good. The wildness and adventure that are in fishing still recommended it to me.
Despite the statement of reverence for both lower and higher instincts, it seems that he wants mainly to rise above his animal desires. Maybe it would more accurately reflect his actual thinking to say that the higher and lower instincts each have their proper season. Boyhood is a time when it is natural and healthy to follow the "primitive rank and savage" urges, but he expects that these will be purged away in those who aspire to be philosophers. I think he's probably right about hunting and fishing being the best way (at least for boys) to forge a permanent bond with nature. Today we have something called outdoor education, but I doubt this does as good a job as stalking fish and animals, for all the cruelty involved.
11.5 I have found repeatedly, of late years, that I cannot fish without falling a little in self-respect. I have tried it again and again. I have skill at it, and, like many of my fellows, a certain instinct for it, which revives from time to time, but always when I have done I feel that it would have been better if I had not fished. I think that I do not mistake. It is a faint intimation, yet so are the first streaks of morning. There is unquestionably this instinct in me which belongs to the lower orders of creation; yet with every year I am less a fisherman, though without more humanity or even wisdom; at present I am no fisherman at all.
This happened to me, too. I was an enthusiastic fisherman for many years, but gradually dropped it as somewhat distasteful. I didn't give up eating fish, though, so I am just letting someone else do the killing. Thoreau never loses his fondness for wildness in the sense of having contact with it and preserving it. He does,though, envision a progression in himself away from wildness toward the higher orders of creation.
1.6 It is hard to provide and cook so simple and clean a diet as will not offend the imagination; but this, I think, is to be fed when we feed the body; they should both sit down at the same table. Yet perhaps this may be done. The fruits eaten temperately need not make us ashamed of our appetites, nor interrupt the worthiest pursuits. But put an extra condiment into your dish, and it will poison you. It is not worth the while to live by rich cookery.
This appears to approach the ascetic. Later he says even if the body were to lack nourishment from this pure food, the benefit would be in avoiding an offense to the spirit.
The wonder is how they, how you and I, can live this slimy, beastly life, eating and drinking.
Veering toward an extreme of ascetism?
11.10 Our whole life is startlingly moral. There is never an instant's truce between virtue and vice.
We would like to, and especially today need to, think otherwise. But every time we get into our cars or eat at a fast-food restaurant wse are making a moral choice.
I have to think that to his readers, this might have been the strangest-sounding chapter in the book.
DWill