Search for the Genuine, The: Nonfiction, 1970-2015

by Jim Harrison

“You must concentrate upon and consecrate yourself wholly to each day, as though a fire were raging in your hair.”

Meanwhile, if you wish to bark into the distance during cocktail hour, try to remind yourself that it’s just barking.

you’re blind to this in our past, you’re liable to be blind to it in the present and future.

Perhaps feeling cold and sick and utterly frightened on Everest or a balsa raft is not nearly so injurious to the spirit as feeling cold and sick and utterly frightened sitting at a desk in an office building.

Deep within us, but also on the surface, is the wounded ugly boy who has never caught an acceptable angle of himself in the mirror.

It is the artfulness of the prose and construct I’m looking for, not someone’s fungoid wisdom. Good writers seem to know that we are permanently inconsolable.

There is a not quite comic schism inherent in the idea that on a daily basis the New York Times and All Things Considered tell us everything that is happening in the world, but neglect to include how we are to endure this information.

It only gradually occurred to me that our wounds are far less unique than our cures.

It has dawned on me that we appear to make certain specific decisions on a subconscious level far before we realize them, then simultaneously war against these decisions on a conscious level.

became absolutely convinced that barring unfortunate circumstances we all are, in totality, what we wish to be, and if something was quite wrong, the “wrongness” came from a radically skewed and wounded core that had to be approached.

The government offers you nothing but apprehension. Only you can offer yourself peace.

suddenly remembered reading that in the seventh century the Church decided dogs couldn’t go to heaven because they didn’t contribute to the

Church. If that’s true then I don’t want to go either. I’m very poor at dates and numbers and what happened at what time in our life. But if my wife mentions the name of a dog we’ve owned and loved, I can re-create the dog’s life with us, and consequently my own. (Field

The meat was coming out of the slicer pretty thin and pale, and what brain was left was bruised on its wobbly stem, or full of sour air like a rubber ball—an experience shared with millions of other alpha nitwits one sees ricocheting through life. Just plain burning up all the wood the first two months of winter. That’s what it is.

Practically speaking, a life that is vowed with simplicity, appropriate boldness, good humor, gratitude, unstinting work and play, and lots of walking brings us close to the actual existing world and its wholeness.” (Esquire

In the very long struggle to find out your own true character there is the real possibility you’ll discover a simpleton beneath the skin, or at least something deeply peculiar.

It occurred to me after reading it that one reason you stick with a friend is because they are able to surprise and enliven you.

As sport, grouse hunting has often seemed ill advised to me in terms of the hours spent. But that is John Calvin creeping up again with all of his boring, utilitarian advice.

“Do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars; you have a right to be here.”

two grandchildren who are easier, moment by moment, to adore because they are being raised by someone else.

People think they love the wilderness but very few do at close range.

You scarcely think of a man as rebellious if it has never occurred to him to think about the rules, much less obey them.

Wanting a place to be like it used to be is the most boring of all human preoccupations. I

Actually, the intelligent people I know use sport as a total wipeout of the mind, whether it is tennis, fishing, or hunting.

The sea is foreign, and a trip to a foreign land is a succession of strangely durable perceptions.

want to send each member of Congress four books: Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, Gary Snyder’s Practice of the Wild, and Peter Matthiessen’s Wildlife in America. If all the members of Congress actually read these four books the entire environmental movement could dissolve because it would no longer be needed.

beauty and genius of a work of art may be reconceived, though its first material expression be destroyed; a vanished harmony may yet again inspire the composer; but when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can be again.”

There is nothing more destructive to the quality of sport than its mechanization.

simply agree with the visionary notion that reality is the aggregate of the perceptions of all creatures.

Since I’m quite a fibber myself, what with being a novelist, I tend to believe other fibbers unquestioningly.

Walking makes the world its own size and a scant hour in a forty-acre woodlot is liable to dissipate the worst case of claustrophobia. The

if you don’t take a nap you are not fresh for the day’s second half. You become a conniving eco–ward heeler with fatigued ideas about how you would run the West if you were king of the cordillera.

There’s a bit of that feeling we all remember when we got our first driver’s license and drove off in the country alone. Our spirits elevated into new possibilities.

I’m generally an eco-ninny but with grandchildren and dogs playing in the yard and after losing an English setter who was bitten twice in the face, I now consider rattlesnakes to be terrorists and treat them accordingly.

My editor had told me we couldn’t drive with alcohol in our “systems,” rather mechanical wording,

Impossible missions are very soothing.

The state of Veracruz is a green and rumpled place of surpassing beauty, the equal of anywhere in North America. From Córdoba to the west you can see Pico de Orizaba, the highest mountain in Mexico at nearly twenty thousand feet,

Looking in a window at a gold Rolex, the girls doubtless figured out that it would take years to buy such a watch—so much effort to tell the time, when it is always time to go to work, rest for work, and eat for strength to work.

Many of us who are reasonably informed when it comes to so-called Third World cultures are often belittled because we have a “return ticket,” but then most of us know nothing at all.

There is a salsa song that goes, “This world is full of fucking sharks, so we have to learn to swim.”

This moat would certainly create jobs but was perhaps no more feasible than my own plan for an underground airport.

Like many other great athletes and men of genius in the arts or politics, he does not assume an environment but creates his own as he goes.

It is not simply a matter of style, but probably a nearly conscious decision on how to achieve one’s ends by a particular appropriation of life’s energies.

Personality brings us close to a balk and we are clearly superstitious about the magic of excellence.

is as intrinsically beautiful and complicated, and not quite as fearsome, as our own.

The water is there and we can all own it and there are few reasons to get upset—literally or figuratively. The beauty, the fun, the slight spice of danger in sports afloat offset the troubles, the hardships, the fears. And rightly so, or else we would stay safely tucked in our living rooms with small chance for happiness. (Sports

As a twenty-five-year student of Zen, I must tell you that fishing is fishing and Zen is Zen. The confusion here is that any activity that requires skill and during which we also manage to keep our mouths shut seems to acquire a touch of the sacred.

This is all the more reason to go fishing, which is a singular way to “get out of your mind” to where you might very well belong.

This is all plaintively idiotic, but to have fun the inner and the outer child must become the same, which is harder than it sounds. For

“Catch and release” is sensible, which shouldn’t be confused with virtuous. “I beat the shit out of you but I didn’t kill you” is not clearly understood by the fish.