I posted
here about Oppian's description of the traits necessary in one who wishes to fish and, if you haven't read Johan's comment on that post, you really must. Since then, I've found several other summaries of the character traits necessary for the angler and there's a good one in A. St.J. Michaels' book,
Circumventing The Mahseer and Other Sporting Fish in India and Burma, which was first published in 1948. (I have to admit that I came across it because it's quoted in Charles Rangeley-Wilson's also very interesting and much more easily accessible book,
The Accidental Angler.)
The Attributes of the Good Angler: the patience of Job, the eye and observance of the eagle; the perseverance of the termite; the hands of the artificer; the touch of a musician; the temper of a saint; and, above all, an insatiable ambition to learn.
I'm reminded a little of the account of fishing that Charles Bradford includes in
The Determined Angler and which I quoted
here:
All Sports in Angling.—"The sport that sums up dancing, song and picture, athletics and all games of chance is angling. The waves make you dance, all pictures roll before you, any chance can win the pool, and every fishing boat is a sängerfest. "—B. M. Briggs.
I enjoy these attempts to describe things through collections of comparisons which sit aside each other rather strangely. The oddness of the picture they produce seems to hint at how difficult the object of the description actually is to capture.
From Augusta Stevenson, Children's Classics in Dramatic Form, Houghton Mifflin (Boston), 1909, by Illustrator unknown [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
By co-incidence, Gary, the porter on our building, gave me a very long account of the Attributes of a Good Angler yesterday morning. Normally taciturn, he had heard about our fishing project and was persuaded I was really doing it by my account that we were to go fishing on the 16th April. He then told me the Attributes of the Good Angler. A lot, he said, was a kind of instinctive knowledge a 'knowing' that ran deep. He would arrive, he said, at a piece of water, and just by noticing the way a particular patch of water lay, its flattening and bulging he would know to fish there. He went to to water he said, and with a minute he had caught a fish. Another man would not notice this.
ReplyDeleteTerry, on Thursday, also talked of the qualities required to fish. He said that he had fished for 60 years and was still learning. He made his own tackle, which made a difference. He learned by watching - just the other day, he said, he watched a boy of 12 fish with 'soft hands' that held the rod in a loose way and this taught him something he needed to do to hold the rod. He talked of acquiring wisdom in fishing as a kind of skill requiring a sort of humility and a source of quiet pride.