You can’t live on dessert alone.Īnd yet even waiting on the water I’m more engaged than I am anywhere else. Similarly, catching a fish without waiting is a distorted experience.
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THE ART OF STILLNESS SHAKESPEARE FULL
All that time is necessary to feel the full weight of what she’s singing. Getting to that point reveals the burden of her character’s loss and the delicate forgiveness of her husband. You can listen to it anytime, but if you watch the opera at the Met it’s four hours into the production. When Countess Almaviva sings her aria at the end of The Marriage of Figaro, it’s one of the most beautiful passages in music. Tom McGuane wrote that it’s the long stretches of silence that give fishing its purpose. The seeming nothing is what gives shape to the eruption of activity, it offers a symmetry, though really an asymmetry, to the strike. Even when nothing seems to be happening, something is happening. When I’m on the water, I’m out of time and the world recedes. This escape is not exactly illicit, but it certainly takes you outside the course of events of the day.įishing is waiting. This is the same reason why a good lunch-a proper three-hour lunch, where wine is ordered by the bottle not the glass-is so rare and rewarding. Fishing offers an internal reward, and that personal satisfaction is enough. I still do it for the sheer joy of being outside, of concentrating, of the doubts and rewards of being connected to a fish, of landing and releasing it. We had a cabin on a lake in Wisconsin, and what could make more sense than to row a boat out into the bay and cast to bass as the sun went down over the trees? What I enjoyed then I still enjoy now: the solitude and mystery, the bursts of action, the near misses, the occasional triumphs and, when it’s over, rowing home in silence, the water smooth as glass.Īs a man, standing in a stream on a weekday afternoon in late spring, casting to trout, is a more conscious decision. I began fishing as a boy not because I thought it was morally redeeming, but because I loved it. Perhaps fishing is decadent, but it didn’t always seem that way. A friend has an insight-Everybody knows about the salmon fishing in Iceland, but did you hear about their brown trout?-apparently it’s great, and I find myself on an esoteric website at midnight in a language I don’t read. The obsession, when it takes hold, is global and total. But also salmon, bonefish, striped bass, and more, all over the world.
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This is fishing.īy fishing, I mean fly fishing, with its traditional way of casting, wading or from a drift boat, often for trout.
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Beneath the surface are mysteries we can barely make out, so we study and speculate and remember every detail we can.
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I’m still trying to understand the rivers in my life beyond the most basic familiarity. The names of rivers I’ve yet to fish are etched in my head like the titles of great novels sitting unread on the shelf. There’s so much water, and it takes years, longer, to learn a river’s nature. I’ve studied maps with snaking blue lines and evocative names waiting to be fished: the Jefferson, the Test, the Spey, the Alta. Life interferes with the best angling intentions. The discovery is bittersweet, however, because the chances of coming back are low. It’s like discovering a secret hidden in plain sight. If I’ve decided the river’s promising, I privately plot a return. Then I break from my reverie before I swerve into oncoming traffic. I speculate about where they might be hiding and how I’d try to catch them. I can’t drive over a bridge without looking down at the river and wondering whether trout live there.