The Hammock Papers: Pursuit.

12 June 2013

Pursuit.

Gus: What’s to love? Where is the Whopper? Or the soul that jumps in the living river – where is it? And where are these sages and buddhas holing up, now that we really need them?

Titus: Would you know one if you met one? Have you even looked? How hard did you look? How easy should they be to find? … Look, Gus: why can’t a duffer like me catch fish? Isn’t the answer obvious? Isn’t it because at my present level of skill the fish would have to be so damned dumb and easily duped and utterly unelusive that they wouldn’t be worth catching? How much more elusive should a thing so wondrous as the soul be? It’s not a hatchery trout! And are you sure it’s never flashed inside you? What was it in you that loved to watch Thomas Bigeater fish? What healed you and made you happy the night you remembered Bill Bob’s pine knot and our elusive twins? What nearly jumped out of your rib cage and ravaged your brain the day you met the elusive Eddy?

Fisherman should be the easiest of men to convince to commence the search for the soul, because fishing is nothing but the pursuit of the elusive. Fish invisible to laymen like me are visible to anglers like you by a hundred subtle signs. How can you be so sagacious and patient in seeking fish, and so hasty and thick as to write off your soul because you can’t see it?

- David James Duncan, from The River Why

The book is always better (and this is one of the best), but the movie isn't bad ... and the music is outstanding.

No comments:

Post a Comment

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL