Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Jim Harrison
Read between
July 9 - July 16, 2025
I think it was the novelist Tom Robbins who said that he doubted that success was an adequate response to life.
Saving money, though pragmatically laudable, gets you in the garden-variety trap of trying to figure how much is enough.
“While I sit here listening to the waves which ripple and break on this shore, I am absolved from all obligation to the past.”
Every few years I’ve taken to the idea of worms or minnows as bait or plugs for casting for pike and bass. The mood usually doesn’t last and probably emerges from my modest egalitarianism, also an occasional sense of repulsion from being in the company of fresh- or saltwater fly fishermen when they are especially full of themselves, all fey and flouncing and arcane, somewhat like country clubbers peering with distaste over the fence at the ghetto bait types in the distance.
It is, however, fine indeed to know that if you’ve lost something very good in your life it’s still possible to go looking for it.
Oddly, and one learns it very slowly, purist fishermen are among the great bores of the world. They see with a pointillist’s vision, similar to the professional dieter, the habitual dope smoker, the tennis fanatic, the granola muncher who forces their new crop of blanched alfalfa sprouts onto your plate. Or the hard-core Manhattan business drunk.
But a few times a year it is good to rid yourself of your average baggage, partly to see if it was worth carrying at all.
cases of a superb Burgundy—Côte de Beaune-Villages—and a case of Château d’Yquem,
plus a mixed case of Calvados
an extension of their ambitions, a muddy mirror of their endless days of working or drinking. But there I was on Sunday, boarding a
The only plus aspect of pain is that, for unclear reasons, it makes one’s surroundings far more vivid and memorable.
A writer’s consciousness should be relentlessly predatory, and any extra insight, no matter the source, is appreciated.
Our culture is so sodden with irony that overwhelming beauty is often not quite palpable.
Meursault?”
This is an unabashedly primitive coolant to a troubled mind—to eat steak and drink too much whiskey out in the woods in the middle of the night.
When you fish at night, you are a pure sense mechanism. You are so far “out of your mind” that you are rather surprised, and not necessarily pleasantly, when you return. But that’s what sport is supposed to do, and night fishing is a sport that colors all your other movements. From the boy catching bass at night to the man repeating the gesture three decades later is an inexhaustibly sensible step through time.
equipment isn’t nearly as critical as knowledge of habitat.
