the sun's familiar

Here is Thoreau again but this passage is not from Walden but from A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. An encounter with an angler reminds him of another fisherman he had met years before:

A straight old man he was, who took his way in silence through the meadows, having passed the period of communication with his fellows; his old experienced coat hanging long and straight and brown as the yellow pine bark, glittering with so much smothered sunlight, if you stood near enough, no work of art but naturalized at length. I often discovered him unexpectedly amid the pads and the gray willows when he moved, fishing in some old country method - for youth and age then went a-fishing together - full of incommunicable thoughts perchance about his own Tyne and Northumberland. He was always to be seen in serene afternoon haunting the river, and almost rustling with the sedge; so many sunny hours in an old man's life, entrapping silly fish; almost grown to be the sun's familiar [...]. His fishing was not a sport, nor solely a means of subsistence, but a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world, just as the aged read their Bibles.

There is some powerful writing here - 'so many sunny hours in an old man's life', 'almost grown to be the sun's familiar', 'a sort of solemn sacrament and withdrawal from the world'. I find this passage strangely moving in its evocation of what seems to me a state of grace in old age - Insha'Allah, as they say.

The River Tyne at Hexham (Image by Darrin Antrobus [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons. org/ licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons.)