Rivers of Memory Harry Middleton Amazon.com pris: utsolgt! Hardcopy - 112 pages (april 1993) Pruett Publishing Company ISBN: 0871088355 Link til boka på Amazon.com

Jeg digger Harry Middletons bøker. Gierach og Gary Boger & CO burde rulles i tjære og fjær for å antyde deres bøker fortjener å stå i samme bokhylle som Harry Middletons beste. Så det er utgangspunktet her.. :-)

Da jeg endelig fikk Rivers of Memory i posten, var det en skikkelig nedtur. Dette var ikke en bok, dette var mer som et lite hefte. Med 89 sider (resten er forord), bittelite format og langt fra papirgjerrig fordeling av tekst på sidene, betraktet jeg den med et surt ansikt. Dum som jeg var.

Boken er kanskje liten, men innholdet er stort. Teksten er kanskje kort, men den er så bra at jeg måtte lese avsnittene om og om igjen, for å la inntrykket synke inn. Middelton har en fantastisk evne til å beskrive essensing i fluefiske, slik jeg ser den. Dette er en poetisk bok. Språket er enkelt, men likevel fantastisk utfyllende.

I permen står følgende omtale:

The writing sings. This is a book to savor and cherish. -- John Nichols

Motter poles the skiff farther onto the flat, keeps our backs to the sun. I keep my watch on the bow, fly rod in hand, line coiled at my feet, an awkward and sunburnt Captain Ahab, a willowy fly rod my harpoon, a fraudulent epoxy shrimp my lethal barb, heat and light pulsating off the mirrored water. The flats will exhaust you whether to see a hundred fish or none at all. Sometimes -- when you are spent, eyes soakes in stinging sweat and leg muscles cramped from hours of standing on the bow, hands stiff from holding the rod, arms sunburned the color of fresh blisters -- sometimes there comes a moment of pure contentment, a moment beyond thought and reason, beyond interpretation or rational understanding, a moment when you cannot seperate yourself from glaring sunlight, hot wind, and moving water.

---

"What are we going to say about this?", said the photographer.
"I mean, uh, what's the story. How do we work it?"
And this was all I could think of to tell him:
That not everything about fishing is noble and reasonable and sane. That fishing is not an escape from from life, but often a deeper immersion into it, all of it, the good and the awful, the joyous and the miserable, the comic, the embarrassing, the tragic, and the sorrowful.

---

In the belly of all this beauty are the hard truths of absolutes -- living and dying, the reminder that the natural world cares not for any single life but only for life itself, connected and whole, abiding. That is what this grand opera of sunlight and wind, sea and fish, sand and gras and tides is about: the maintenance not of the living but of life.

---

Juni, 2000. Christian Figenschou

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