Casting Fishing Quotes

Chance is always powerful. Let your hook be always cast; in the pool where you least expect it, there will be a fish.

If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets.

She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see. And Hamnet? Where is

Fireflies out on a warm summer's night, seeing the urgent, flashing, yellow-white phosphorescence below them, go crazy with desire; moths cast to the winds an enchantment potion that draws the opposite sex, wings beating hurriedly, from kilometers away; peacocks display a devastating corona of blue and green and the peahens are all aflutter; competing pollen grains extrude tiny tubes that race each other down the female flower's orifice to the waiting egg below; luminescent squid present rhapsodic light shows, altering the pattern, brightness and color radiated from their heads, tentacles, and eyeballs; a tapeworm diligently lays a hundred thousand fertilized eggs in a single day; a great whale rumbles through the ocean depths uttering plaintive cries that are understood hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, where another lonely behemoth is attentively listening; bacteria sidle up to one another and merge; cicadas chorus in a collective serenade of love; honeybee couples soar on matrimonial flights from which only one partner returns; male fish spray their spunk over a slimy clutch of eggs laid by God-knows-who; dogs, out cruising, sniff each other's nether parts, seeking erotic stimuli; flowers exude sultry perfumes and decorate their petals with garish ultraviolet advertisements for passing insects, birds, and bats; and men and women sing, dance, dress, adorn, paint, posture, self-mutilate, demand, coerce, dissemble, plead, succumb, and risk their lives. To say that love makes the world go around is to go too far. The Earth spins because it did so as it was formed and there has been nothing to stop it since. But the nearly maniacal devotion to sex and love by most of the plants, animals, and microbes with which we are familiar is a pervasive and striking aspect of life on Earth. It cries out for explanation. What is all this in aid of? What is the torrent of passion and obsession about? Why will organisms go without sleep, without food, gladly put themselves in mortal danger for sex? ... For more than half the history of life on Earth organisms seem to have done perfectly well without it. What good is sex?... Through 4 billion years of natural selection, instructions have been honed and fine-tuned...sequences of As, Cs, Gs, and Ts, manuals written out in the alphabet of life in competition with other similar manuals published by other firms. The organisms become the means through which the instructions flow and copy themselves, by which new instructions are tried out, on which selection operates. 'The hen,' said Samuel Butler, 'is the egg's way of making another egg.' It is on this level that we must understand what sex is for. ... The sockeye salmon exhaust themselves swimming up the mighty Columbia River to spawn, heroically hurdling cataracts, in a single-minded effort that works to propagate their DNA sequences into future generation. The moment their work is done, they fall to pieces. Scales flake off, fins drop, and soon--often within hours of spawning--they are dead and becoming distinctly aromatic. They've served their purpose. Nature is unsentimental. Death is built in.

Life is maybe like deep-sea fishing. We wake up in the morning, we cast our nets into the water, an, if we are lucky, at day's end we will have netted one-- maybe two-- small fish. Occasionally we will net a seahorse or sometimes a shark-- or a life preserver or an iceberg, or a monster. And in our dreams at night we assess our Catch of the Day-- the treasures of this long, slow process of accumulation...

Ah, I cast indeed my net into their sea, and meant to catch good fish; but always did I draw up the head of some ancient God.

When someone does wrong, whether it is you or me, whether it is mother or father, whether it is the Gold Coast man or the white man, it is like a fisherman casting a net into the water. He keeps only the one or two fish that he needs to feed himself and puts the rest back in the water, thinking that their lives will go back to normal. No one forgets that they were once captive, even if they are now free. But still, Yaw, you have to let yourself be free.

His hatred for all was so intense that it should extinguish the very love from which it was conceived. And thus, he ceased to feel. There was nothing further in which to believe that made the prospect of feeling worthwhile. Daily he woke up and cast downtrodden eyes upon the sea and he would say to himself with a hint of regret at his hitherto lack of indifference, 'All a dim illusion, was it? Surely it was foolish of me to think any of this had meaning.' He would then spend hours staring at the sky, wondering how best to pass the time if everything—even the sky itself— were for naught. He arrived at the conclusion that there was no best way to pass the time. The only way to deal with the illusion of time was to endure it, knowing full well, all the while, that one was truly enduring nothing at all. Unfortunately for him, this nihilistic resolution to dispassion didn’t suit him very well and he soon became extremely bored. Faced now with the choice between further boredom and further suffering, he impatiently chose the latter, sailing another few weeks along the coast , and then inland, before finally dropping anchor off the shores of the fishing village of Yami.

Cast up the heart flops over gasping 'Love' a foolish fish which tries to draw its breath from flesh of air And no one there to hear its death among the sad bushes where the world rushes by in a blather of asphalt and delay

I have a great liking for polygraphs who cast their fishing poles in all directions...

Now this was one of the things I had been brought up to eschew like disgrace; it being held by my father neither the part of a Christian nor yet of a gentleman to set his own livelihood and fish for that of others, on the cast of painted pasteboard.

I had to cast out a good many lines, though, before I got what I wanted, and when I landed the fish I did not for a moment suppose it was my fish. But I listened to what I was told out of a constitutional liking for useless information, and I found myself in possession of a very curious story, though, as I imagined, not the story I was looking for.

Let your hook be always cast in the pond. when you least expect it, there will be fish.

The fish rots from the head.” Fish rotted all over, cell corruption being nonhierarchical and not caste-driven, but point taken.

White-crested waves crash on the shore. The masts sway violently, every which way. In the gray sky the gulls are circling like white flakes. Rain squalls blow past like gray slanting sails, and blue gaps open in the sky. The air brightens. A cold silvery evening. The moon is overhead, and down below, in the water; and all around it-a wide frame of old, hammered, scaly silver. Etched on the silver-silent black fishing boats, tiny black needles of masts, little black men casting invisible lines into the silver. And the only sounds are the occasional plashing of an oar, the creaking of an oarlock, the springlike leap and flip-flop of a fish. ("The North")

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the signposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

The sun was low in the sky, casting slant regal light. As they plodded along, the golden radiance intensified until it seemed to emanate from every feature of the land. Trees, brush, snow, hills. She couldn’t stop looking. The road led past frozen sloughs that bristled with scorched reeds. Clutches of red willow burned. The fans and whips of branches glowed, alive. Winter clouds formed patterns against the fierce gray sky. Scales, looped ropes, the bones of fish. The world was tender with significance.

Manifestation is an act of trust. It is the soul pouring itself out into its world, like a fisherman casting a net to gather in the fish he seeks; with each cast properly made, we will bring what we need to us, but first we must hurl ourselves into the depths without knowing just what lies beneath us.

If you have a monster inside of you, please teach it how to jump, and laugh, and fly and catch fish! Please teach it to climb mountains to watch sunsets and wade in ponds to feel moonlight. Please love your monster, tell it that it has a home, teach it that it has a place in this world, maybe it likes ice cream, maybe marshmallows make it smile, maybe it goes to beautiful places in its dreams at night. One day it will sit atop a clocktower and cast sunbeams onto everyone! Because it will learn that! Because angels are too busy to do that, but monsters are not. Monsters would love to catch sunbeams and eat sugar donuts. Teach your monsters, they will form moonbeams one day!

Finally, Gunner spoke, his voice so fluid and moving, it could have come from the river itself. "I once hear a poem about angling. It say when you send out your line, it is like you cast out your troubles to let the current carry them away. I keep casting.

If you cast your bait after the fish have passed, you will only catch despair.

He wanted me to go with him, and had cast his line, hoping to snag his most elusive catch - me.

They fish because a cast is a prayer for the believer and a hope for the heathen, and the more casts you make, the more likely your prayer will be answered or your hope be realized.

Now I must get up and go while they are all quiet. Where are my things? Things have a will of their own in this place and hide where they like. Daylight will strike a sudden blow on the roof startling them all up to their feet; faces will beam asking, Where are you going, What are you doing, What are you thinking, How do you feel, Why do you say such things, What do you mean? No more sleep. Where are are my boots and what horse shall I ride? Fiddler or Graylie or Miss Lucy with the long nose and the wicked eye? How I have loved this house in the morning before we are all awake and tangled together like badly cast fishing lines.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

Fishing provides time to think, and reason not to. If you have the virtue of patience, an hour or two of casting alone is plenty of time to review all you’ve learned about the grand themes of life. It’s time enough to realize that every generalization stands opposed by a mosaic of exceptions, and that the biggest truths are few indeed. Meanwhile, you feel the wind shift and the temperature change. You might simply decide to be present, and observe a few facts about the drifting clouds…Fishing in a place is a meditation on the rhythm of a tide, a season, the arc of a year, and the seasons of life... I fish to scratch the surface of those mysteries, for nearness to the beautiful, and to reassure myself the world remains. I fish to wash off some of my grief for the peace we so squander. I fish to dip into that great and awesome pool of power that propels these epic migrations. I fish to feel- and steal- a little of that energy.

Throgh me men gon into that blysful place Of hertes hele and dedly woundes cure; Thorgh me men gon unto the welle of grace, There grene and lusty May shal evere endure. This is the wey to al good aventure. Be glad, thow redere, and thy sorwe of-caste; Al open am I - passe in, and sped thee faste!' 'Thorgh me men gon,' than spak that other side, 'Unto the mortal strokes of the spere Of which Disdayn and Daunger is the gyde, There nevere tre shal fruyt ne leves bere. This strem yow ledeth to the sorweful were There as the fish in prisoun is al drye; The'eschewing is only the remedye!

We are souls with bodies, not the other way around. Without the essence of who we are—intact and authentically within our vessels—we are unblinking, inanimate objects; we are no longer soil. . . we are dirt.” ~ Steve Ramirez, Casting Forward

Dear Amelia, I hear there are giant jellyfish in the Arctic, tentacles longer than train carriages. Haystacks fly over cities in whirlwinds, and fish frogs and turtles rain on towns. There are spaces of perfect nothing that they call black holes. Nothing's impossible- that's what you think I'm trying to say. But I'm not. There are things that are impossible - unimaginable even- and here they are: That I broke you. Betrayed you. Said I'd given up on you. Sent you flying to a park in a thunderstorm. That I've been wrong about you all along- saw something in your face each time you faded to your past, when the opposite was true. That all this time you've been lost and that I won't get a second chance to find you. Amelia your name is a song. It's a name you can't say without smiling or crying, without casting both shadows and light. But there are too many places to hide or get lost in a name like Amelia. So this is me shouting that name. They say nobody ever escapes from a black hole. They don't know the strength in my Amelia. The strength in your grip when you want to stay out dancing- the strength in your wicked smile. Riley

If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,” he murmured. It was his mother’s expression and he always used it when he felt the blackness of tomorrow on him. Then he thought what an odd expression that was to be taking to a planet that had never known seas or fishes.

You used to say you would never forget me. That made me feel like the cherry blossom, here today and gone tomorrow; it is not the kind of thing one says to a person with whom one proposes to spend the rest of one's life, after all. And, after all that, for three hundred and fifty-two in each leap year, I never think about you, sometimes. I cast an image into the past, like a fishing line, and up it comes with a gold mask on the hook, a mask with real tears at the ends of its eyes, but tears that are no longer anybody's tears. Time has drifted over your face.

One of my own stray childhood fears had been to wonder what a whale might feel like had it been born and bred in captivity, then released into the wild-into its ancestral sea-its limited world instantly blowing up when cast into the unknowable depths, seeing strange fish and tasting new waters, not even having a concept of depth, not knowing the language of any whale pods it might meet. It was my fear of a world that would expand suddenly, violently, and without rules or laws: bubbles and seaweed and storms and frightening volumes of dark blue that never end

This Henry lived in Edinburgh, making him inaccessible and giving her something to do on the weekends — 'Oh, just flying up to Scotland, Henry's taking me fishing,' which is the kind of thing she imagined people doing in Scotland — she always thought of the Queen Mother, incongruous in mackintosh and waders, standing in the middle of a shallow brown river (somewhere on the outskirts of Brigadoon, no doubt) and casting a line for trout.

The moon rose up that evening and shot her silver arrows at the house under the artu tree. The house was empty. Then the moon came across the sea and across the reef. She lit the lagoon to it's dark, dim heart. She lit the coral brains and sand spaces, and the fish casting their shadows on the sand and the coral. The keeper of the lagoon rose to greet her, and the fin of him broke her reflection on the mirror-like surface into a thousand glittering ripples. She saw the white staring ribs of the form on the reef. Then, peeping over the trees, she looked down into the valley, where the great stone idol had kept it's solitary vigil for five thousand years, perhaps, and more. At this base, in his shadow, looking as if under his protection, lay two human beings, naked, clasped in each other's arms and fast asleep. One could scarcely pity his vigil, had it been marked sometimes through the years by such an incident as this. The thing had been conducted just as the birds conduct their love affairs. An affair absolutely natural, absolutely blameless and without sin. A marriage according to Nature, without feasts or guests, consummated with accidental cynicism under the shadow of a religion a thousand years dead.

Each religion claims the future for its followers; or, at least, the good thereof. The evil is for those benighted ones who will have none of it; seeing the light the true believers worship, as the fishes see the stars, but dimly. The religions come and the religions pass, and the civilisations come and pass, and naught endures but the world and human nature. Ah! if man would but see that hope is from within and not from without—that he himself must work out his own salvation! He is there, and within him is the breath of life and a knowledge of good and evil as good and evil is to him. Thereon let him build and stand erect, and not cast himself before the image of some unknown God, modelled like his poor self, but with a bigger brain to think the evil thing, and a longer arm to do it.

Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,––to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.

He lay with a pack of panting dogs on a hill overlooking plains where antelope grazed. He marched with ants, and labored in the rigors of the nest, filing eggs. He danced the mating dance of the bower bird, and slept on a warm rock with his lizard kin. He was a cloud. He was the shadow of a cloud. He was the moon that cast the shadow of a cloud. He was a blind fish; he was a shoal; he was a whale; he was the sea. He was the lord of all he surveyed. He was a worm in the dung of a kite. He did not grieve, knowing his life was a day long, or an hour. He did not wonder who made him. He did not wish to be other. He did not pray. He did not hope. He only was, and was, and was, and that was the joy of it.

The Sodomy sea shall cast out fish, and make a noise in the night, which many have not known: but they shall all hear the voice thereof.

If wishes were fishes we’d all cast nets,

What is more, when the funds do run dry, blacks, having never learned how the dollars were earned, will be left in the position of once again needing to beg the government for survival. Handouts absent hard work render men weak, and with depleted self-esteem; they stifle the entrepreneurial spirit, by removing our innate senses of drive and aspiration. Poverty and despair become the life of the man who is given a fish but never learns to cast his own line. And though many will sympathize, prosperity will never be won until we become our own lifeline.

Thinking of those times as he passed the cemetery on his way to the evening’s festivities, Gabe recalled the day Matty’s body had been found and carried home. Gabe had been young then, only eight, a rambunctious resident of the Children’s House, happiest with solitary adventures and disinterested in schoolwork. But he had always admired Matty, who had tended and helped Seer with such devotion and undertaken village tasks with energy and good humor. It had been Matty who had taught Gabe to bait a hook and cast his line from the fishing rock, Matty who had shown him how to make a kite and catch the wind with it. The day of his death, Gabe had huddled, heartbroken, in the shadow of a thick stand of trees and watched as the villagers lined the path and bowed their heads in respect to watch the litter carrying the ravaged body move slowly through. Frightened by his own feelings, he had listened mutely to the wails of grief that permeated the community.

I saw El Santuario as being built on hope, which is not the same thing as faith. Hope is a cast line in search of fish; faith is the belief that you won’t starve to death, or that if you do, God’s plan could account for the tragedy. My morning prayers begin with, “Blessed Mystery, thank you for … and Blessed Mystery, may I …” Remission appears over and over in the latter: May I be well.

I’ve learned a lot in this year. I’ve learned that the way to get your soul back isn’t to chase it but rather to quietly wait for it. When you’re ready, it finds you.” ~ Steve Ramirez, Casting Forward

And if the best you can do is quote the Bible in defence of your prejudice, then have the humility to be consistent. The same book that exhorts against the abomination of one man lying with another also contains exhortations against the eating of pork and shell-fish and against menstruating women daring to come near holy places. It’s no good functionalistically claiming that kosher diet had its local, meteorological purposes now defunct, or that the prejudice against ovulation can be dispensed with as superstition, the Bible that you bash us with tells you that much of what you do is unclean: don’t pick and choose with a Revealed Text — or if you do, pick and choose the good bits, the bits that say things like ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’, or ‘Love thy neighbour as thyself’.

And there it is. The threat I have lived with my entire life. If I am not good enough, kind enough, thoughtful enough, obedient enough, I will be cast from my home like a stunted fish from a fisherman's net.

He was casting a big Rapala with three treble hooks which his grandfather had given him. He was fishing too fast, casting again and again, retrieving too fast, until he was red-faced and his tee-shirt stuck to him.

She’d learned how to arm her face the minute she stepped out the door because of boys and men who cast lines her way like she was another fish in that filthy Hudson they called a river. She learned New York evolved because it survived on blood. It was loud because it was a symphony of people shouting their dreams and hoping to be heard. Marimar had longed to add her dreams to that song but when she tried, her voice was a whisper.

Life is a circle, not a line. Circles describe nature from a bird’s nest to raindrops striking a pond. I’d like my life to be round, like that. I’d like my life to be natural.” ~ Steve Ramirez, from The Things That Matter

The third boat was quite pretty, too...this one was an Adirondack fishing boat, and even though it was only half finished, I could picture Jay Gatsby in it, casting a line over the side while he yearned for that shallow tramp, Daisy.

Once, while cleaning the trout before I went home in the almost night, I had a vision of going over to the poor graveyard and gathering up grass and fruit jars and tin cans and markers and wilted flowers and bugs and weeds and clods and going home and putting a hook in the vise and tying a fly with all that stuff and then going outside and casting it up into the sky, watching it float over clouds and then into the evening star. (from Trout Fishing on the Bevel, page 21)

Confession is a swimming against the stream. Now many may swim with the stream, like the dead fish, that cannot swim against the stream, with the living fish. Many may profess Christ, that cannot confess Christ; and so, notwithstanding their profession, yet are but almost Christians.

MAY 6 I HAVE BROKEN LEVIATHAN’S POWER FROM YOUR LIFE MY CHILD, I have broken the demonic power of the sea serpent from your life. I have caused all his demonic little demon fish to stick to his scales as I brought him up out of the midst of the sea and cast him into the wilderness to lie on the open field as food for all the beasts of the field and the birds of the heavens. The rivers and seas belong to Me, and I will make utterly waste and desolate the places where his evil power has dwelt. I am the one who commands the sea and its streams to run dry, and I have broken the power of the evils of the sea from bringing destruction to your life. EZEKIEL 29:3–5; ISAIAH 44:27 Prayer Declaration Father, in the name of Jesus I bind every sea monster that would attack my life or region. You have raised a watch against Leviathan, and You will not let the demonic powers of the sea oppress me. You have stripped him of his power and have taken away his armor. You have caused the places of his domain to become utterly waste and desolate and have thrown him and his demonic spirits into the wilderness to be food for the beasts and birds who dwell there.

Deep sea fishing off Mexico can’t be beat! When you feel that old tug on your pole and that line goes whistling into the deep, that’s it brother! And, there is nothing quite like the way I feel about Wilbert burial vaults either. The combination of a ” pre-cast asphalt inner liner plus extra-thick, reinforced concrete provides the essential qualities for proper burial. My advice to you is, don’t get into “deep water” with burial vaults made of the new lightweight synthetic substitutes. Just keep “reeling in” extra profits by continuing to recommend WILBERT burial vaults....

Sisters of the torn shirts. Sisters of the chase around the desk, casting couch, hotel room, file cabinet. Sisters dragging shattered dreams, bruised hopes, ambitions abandoned in the dirt. Sisters fishing one by one in the lake of shame. Hooks baited with fear always come back empty. Truth dawns slow when you've been beaten and lied to, but it burns hard and bright once it wakes. Sisters, drop everything. Walk away from the lake, leaning on each other's shoulders when you need the support. Feel the contractions of another truth ready to be born. Shame turned inside out is rage.

When you have met God’s conditions, He casts your sins behind His back into the ocean of His forgetfulness. It was Corrie ten Boom who added, “And when God casts our sins into the ocean, He puts up a sign: No fishing!” If almighty God has forgotten your sins, why should you try to remember them?

Therefore whoso worshippeth thee [Jehovah] is accursed. He shall be brayed in a mortar and the powder thereof cast to the winds, that the birds of the air may eat thereof and die; and he shall be dissolved in strong acid and the elixir poured into the sea, that the fishes of the sea may breathe thereof and die. And he shall be mingled with dung and spread upon the earth, so that the herbs of the earth may feed thereof and die; and he shall be burnt utterly with fire, and the ashes thereof shall calcine the children of the flame, that even in hell may be found an overflowing of lamentation.

Even … the wrestler can be caught in a throw-net! A bird of the sky, once fenced in by the net, does not escape one’s hand! A fish of the deep sees the … rushes no more, when the young fisherman casts his net, it is trapped within! No man, whoever he may be, can ascend … from the midst of the Netherworld,

One year, on vacation in Hawaii, I was relaxing at a beach, watching whales in the distance, when a fisherman, obviously a local, drove up in his pick-up truck. He got out with a dozen fishing rods. Not one. A dozen. He baited each hook, cast all the lines into the ocean, and set the rods in the sand. Intrigued, I wandered over and asked him for an explanation. “It’s simple,” he said. “I love fish but I hate fishin’. I like eatin’, not catchn’. So I cast out 12 lines. By sunset, some of them will have caught a fish. Never all of ’em. So if I only cast one or two I might go hungry. But 12 is enough so some always catch. Usually there’s enough for me and extras to sell to local restaurants. This way, I live the life I want.” The simple fellow had unwittingly put his finger on a powerful secret. The flaw in most businesses, that keeps them always in desperate need—which suppresses prices—is: too few lines cast in the ocean.

Why is it that we claim to want certainty? Only fools and cowards seek certainty. Certainty is a dead end; it’s a rich old widow living out the rest of her days on the Upper East Side with a little dog and big memories. Unless you are a senior citizen, you’ll go nuts after a few weeks of knowing what the rest of your life will bring. You’ll die of boredom. But uncertainty is what keeps us alive. It is that flip of a coin, that brief moment when it’s in the air or spinning on its side, that snaps us out of our daily stasis. Some invisible Odds Gods are giving you a chance to become better, smarter, richer. What fun it is to get paid if you earned it by the skin of your teeth, by the close call. And how dreadful it is to shoot fish in a barrel. Exposure to uncertainty earns you membership in a select tribe: You are a Padawan mastering the Force. Once the trade is on, once the die has been cast, you’re in a parallel, auspicious universe.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the milestones. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

And he had to say farewell to his hands, his eyes, to hunger and thirst, to love, to playing the lute, to sleeping and waking, to everything. Tomorrow a bird would fly through the air and Goldmund would no longer see it, a girl would sing in a window and he would not hear her song, the river would run and the dark fish would swim silently, the wind would blow and sweep the yellow leaves on the ground, the sun would shine and stars would blink in the sky, young men would go dancing, the first snow would lie on the distant mountains—everything would go on, trees would cast their shadows, people would look gay or sad out of their living eyes, dogs would bark, cows would low in the barns of villages, and all of it without Goldmund.

Thus it was we entered a low eating-house on the lamplit shores of the river in a Moslem neighbourhood, a modest boxwood shanty having no walls at all, but sufficiently screened with hanging bags. There were several benches and three tables, and upon each table were oil-lamps which cast soft shadows on the haze of airborne cooking-fats and wood-smoke, and gently illuminating a dozen Africans at food; on the floor at the farther end were cooking-fires, and a fine diversity of smells arose from bubbling pots and sizzling pans. The chef was a robust ogre of glistening dark bronze with an incense pastille smouldering in his hair, a swearing, sweating Panta-gruel naked to the waist and stoking fires, lifting lids, and scooping out great globs of meat and manioc and fish: he might have been cooking skulls on the shores of River Styx.

She laughed. ‘I hope he will enjoy good sport– though my small experience informs me that catching fish is not necessary for your true angler’s enjoyment.’ ‘Oh, no! But to lose a fish is quite another matter!’ ‘Certainly! One cannot wonder that it should cast even the most cheerful person into gloom, for it is always such an enormous one that escapes!’ ‘I begin to think you are yourself an angler, ma’am: you are so exactly right!

The typical accountant is a man, past middle age, spare, wrinkled, intelligent, cold, passive, non-committal, with eyes like a cod-fish; polite in contact but at the same time unresponsive, calm and damnably composed as a concrete post or a plaster of Paris cast; a petrification with a heart of feldspar and without charm of the friendly germ, minus bowels, passion or a sense of humor. Happily they never reproduce and all of them finally go to Hell.

Coconut trees were fireworks that arced into the sky and exploded in green. Pandanus trees, angular and mop-headed, seemed cut from the pages of a Dr. Seuss book. Breadfruit trees cast generous shadows. The lagoon, never more than twenty feet away, fulfilled every postcard cliché of tropical paradise. On the beach, muscular island men were beaching their wooden sailing canoe after a morning on the water, strings sagging with the weight of colorful reef fish.

To make a tarte of strawberyes," wrote Margaret Parker in 1551, "take and strayne theym with the yolkes of four eggs, and a little whyte breade grated, then season it up with suger and swete butter and so bake it." And Jess, who had spent the past year struggling with Kant's Critiques, now luxuriated in language so concrete. Tudor cookbooks did not theorize, nor did they provide separate ingredient lists, or scientific cooking times or temperatures. Recipes were called receipts, and tallied materials and techniques together. Art and alchemy were their themes, instinct and invention. The grandest performed occult transformations: flora into fauna, where, for example, cooks crushed blanched almonds and beat them with sugar, milk, and rose water into a paste to "cast Rabbets, Pigeons, or any other little bird or beast." Or flour into gold, gilding marchpane and festive tarts. Or mutton into venison, or fish to meat, or pig to fawn, one species prepared to stand in for another.

Man, fishing all through the night of human ignorance, attempts to realise his desires through effort and struggle only to find in the end that his search is fruitless. When man discovers his awareness of being to be Christ Jesus, he will obey its voice and let it direct his fishing. He will cast his hook on the right side; he will apply the law in the right manner and will seek in consciousness for the thing desired. Finding it there, he will know that it will be multiplied in the world of form.

According to the gospels, Christ healed diseases, cast out devils, rebuked the sea, cured the blind, fed multitudes with five loaves and two fishes, walked on the sea, cursed a fig tree, turned water into wine and raised the dead. How is it possible to substantiate these miracles? The Jews, among whom they were said to have been performed, did not believe them. The diseased, the palsied, the leprous, the blind who were cured, did not become followers of Christ. Those that were raised from the dead were never heard of again. Can we believe that Christ raised the dead? A widow living in Nain is following the body of her son to the tomb. Christ halts the funeral procession and raises the young man from the dead and gives him back to the arms of his mother. This young man disappears. He is never heard of again. No one takes the slightest interest in the man who returned from the realm of death. Luke is the only one who tells the story. Maybe Matthew, Mark and John never heard of it, or did not believe it and so failed to record it. John says that Lazarus was raised from the dead. It was more wonderful than the raising of the widow’s son. He had not been laid in the tomb for days. He was only on his way to the grave, but Lazarus was actually dead. He had begun to decay. Lazarus did not excite the least interest. No one asked him about the other world. No one inquired of him about their dead friends. When he died the second time no one said: “He is not afraid. He has traveled that road twice and knows just where he is going.” We do not believe in the miracles of Mohammed, and yet they are as well attested as this. We have no confidence in the miracles performed by Joseph Smith, and yet the evidence is far greater, far better. If a man should go about now pretending to raise the dead, pretending to cast out devils, we would regard him as insane. What, then, can we say of Christ? If we wish to save his reputation we are compelled to say that he never pretended to raise the dead; that he never claimed to have cast out devils. We must take the ground that these ignorant and impossible things were invented by zealous disciples, who sought to deify their leader. In those ignorant days these falsehoods added to the fame of Christ. But now they put his character in peril and belittle the authors of the gospels. Christianity cannot live in peace with any other form of faith. If that religion be true, there is but one savior, one inspired book, and but one little narrow grass-grown path that leads to heaven. Why did he not again enter the temple and end the old dispute with demonstration? Why did he not confront the Roman soldiers who had taken money to falsely swear that his body had been stolen by his friends? Why did he not make another triumphal entry into Jerusalem? Why did he not say to the multitude: “Here are the wounds in my feet, and in my hands, and in my side. I am the one you endeavored to kill, but death is my slave”? Simply because the resurrection is a myth. The miracle of the resurrection I do not and cannot believe. We know nothing certainly of Jesus Christ. We know nothing of his infancy, nothing of his youth, and we are not sure that such a person ever existed. There was in all probability such a man as Jesus Christ. He may have lived in Jerusalem. He may have been crucified; but that he was the Son of God, or that he was raised from the dead, and ascended bodily to heaven, has never been, and, in the nature of things, can never be, substantiated.

A chronic fear of being slighted made him avoid his equals, made him stand, where his inferiors were concerned, self-consciously on his dignity. How bitterly he envied men like Henry Foster and Benito Hoover! Men who never had to shout at an Epsilon to get an order obeyed; men who took their position for granted; men who moved through the caste system as a fish through water—so utterly at home as to be unaware either of themselves or of the beneficent and comfortable element in which they had their being.

The other noble Scholars arrived shortly afterwards. They are all very memorablie famose. Mr Meldreth, a sweet, shy gentleman the colour of dust, is for Insects and haz 237 dead ones in a box. Mr Shepreth haz discovered the date upon which the Citie of London waz first built. This, being like to its Birthe-daye, haz enabled him to caste its horoscope: he knowes all its Future. Dr Foxton haz shewne by Irrefutable Arguments that Cornishmen are a kind of Fishe. His beard curles naturallie - a certaine sign of witt.

As the author of Lost Wife, Saw Barracuda - True Stories from a Sharm el Sheikh Scuba Diving Instructor, I know a thing or two about guide books but I have never quite seen anything like the Buns Guide before. There is certainly nothing arse-about-face with this book and indeed you have to admire the author's cheek, although thankfully he didn't include a photo of it here! What shines through in this quality-produced book is "Stryke" Clayton's intelligence, wit and ability to get away with a subject normally found in magazines and websites of questionable pedigree. The result is a hilarious and surprisingly tasteful book written by someone who would probably feel at home in the cast of Monty Python's Flying Circus. The Buns Guide is a great poke in the ribs at those nature guide books and the plastic animal or fish identity picture cards they sell in national parks around the world. With so many parts to the female anatomy I'm sure the author may well be considering a sequel or two? A great read, very funny and a well-produced book. Full marks here!

is the “waters” of the celestial “ocean” which come to mind, in which Noah’s Ark now swims as a constellation. In the Indian version of this story the ark is a boat on which the Seven Rishis (better known to us as the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major), and the Vedic culture that they represent, are ferried to safety by a giant Fish (the constellation Pisces). Gazing on myth from this angle we can find in the skies many of the cast of characters of “The Greatness of Saturn.” Aditi [* FOOTNOTE: A well-thought-out cosmology which catalogues such extensions of ‘Earth’ into ‘Space’ is presented by Giorgio de Santillana and Hertha von Dechend in Namlet’s Mill, and the interested reader will find a wealth of detail worth pondering in that book.] (‘The Unbroken, Unbounded One’; by extension, eternity) is the mother of the devas, the ‘shining celestials,’ and Diti (‘The Bound, Divided, Cut One’) is the mother of the asuras, the enemies of the devas. There is good reason to believe that Aditi represents the northern celestial hemisphere and the zodiac, which being the part of the heavens that is visible throughout the year

For eighteen months and more, ever since Lady Constance Keeble had first begun to cast her fly and hook over the murky water of the artistic world and jerk its denizens on to the pile carpets of Blandings Castle, Beach had had his fill of eccentricity. But until this moment he had hoped that Psmith was going to prove an agreeable change from the stream of literary lunatics which had been coming and going all that weary time. And lo! Psmith’s name led all the rest. Even the man who had come for a week in April and had wanted to eat jam with his fish paled in comparison.

In fact, here I am these current years 1890 and '91, (each successive fortnight getting stiffer and stuck deeper) much like some hard-cased dilapidated grim ancient shell-fish or time-bang'd conch (no legs, utterly non-locomotive) cast up high and dry on the shore-sands, helpless to move anywhere - nothing left but behave myself quiet, and while away the days yet assign'd, and discover if there is anything for the said grim and time-bang'd conch to be got at last out of inherited good spirits and primal buoyant centre-pulses down there deep somewhere within his gray-blurr'd old shell.

At her feet, a luminous path lit the way through the grassy field. It was made entirely from glow sticks; each of the radiant lights had been painstakingly set into the ground at perfect intervals, tracing a curved trail that shone through the darkness. Apparently, Jay had been busy. Near the water’s edge, at the end of the iridescent pathway and beneath a stand of trees, Jay had set up more than just a picnic. He had created a retreat, an oasis for the two of them. Violet shook her head, unable to find the words to speak. He led her closer, and Violet followed, amazed. Jay had hung more of the luminous glow sticks from the low-hanging branches, so they dangled overhead. They drifted and swayed in the breeze that blew up from the lake. Beneath the natural canopy of limbs, he had set up two folding lounge chairs and covered them with pillows and blankets. “I’d planned to use candles, but the wind would’ve blown ‘em out, so I had to improvise.” “Seriously, Jay? This is amazing.” Violet felt awed. She couldn’t imagine how long it must have taken him. “I’m glad you like it.” He led her to one of the chairs and drew her down until she was sitting before he started unpacking the cooler. She half-expected him to pull out a jar of Beluga caviar, some fancy French cheeses, and Dom Perignon champagne. Maybe even a cluster of grapes to feed to her…one at a time. So when he started laying out their picnic, Violet laughed. Instead of expensive fish eggs and stinky cheeses, Jay had packed Daritos and chicken soft tacos-Violet’s favorites. And instead of grapes, he brought Oreos. He knew her way too well. Violet grinned as he pulled out two clear plastic cups and a bottle of sparkling cider. She giggled. “What? No champagne?” He shrugged, pouring a little of the bubbling apple juice into each of the flimsy cups. “I sorta thought that a DUI might ruin the mood.” He lifted his cup and clinked-or rather, tapped-it against hers. “Cheers.” He watched her closely as she took a sip. For several moments, they were silent. The lights swayed above them, creating shadows that danced over them. The park was peaceful, asleep, as the lake’s waters lapped the shore. Across from them, lights from the houses along the water’s edge cast rippling reflections on the shuddering surface. All of these things transformed the ordinary park into a romantic winter rendezvous.

The verse is about slippage, fall, reversal of fortune, the casting down of the great by the great: around the throne thunder rolls, circa regna tonat; even as he sits under his canopy of estate, the king hears it, he feels it shudder in the stone flags, he feels its reverberation in the bone. He pictures the bolts, hurled by the gods, falling through the crystal spheres where angels sit and pick the fleas from their wings: hurtling, spinning and plunging till, with a roar of white flame, they crash down on Whitehall and fire the roofs; tills they rattle the skeleton teeth of the abbey's dead, melt the glass in the workshops of Southwark, and fry the fish in the Thames.

The Drunken Fisherman" Wallowing in this bloody sty, I cast for fish that pleased my eye (Truly Jehovah's bow suspends No pots of gold to weight its ends); Only the blood-mouthed rainbow trout Rose to my bait. They flopped about My canvas creel until the moth Corrupted its unstable cloth. A calendar to tell the day; A handkerchief to wave away The gnats; a couch unstuffed with storm Pouching a bottle in one arm; A whiskey bottle full of worms; And bedroom slacks: are these fit terms To mete the worm whose molten rage Boils in the belly of old age? Once fishing was a rabbit's foot-- O wind blow cold, O wind blow hot, Let suns stay in or suns step out: Life danced a jig on the sperm-whale's spout-- The fisher's fluent and obscene Catches kept his conscience clean. Children, the raging memory drools Over the glory of past pools. Now the hot river, ebbing, hauls Its bloody waters into holes; A grain of sand inside my shoe Mimics the moon that might undo Man and Creation too; remorse, Stinking, has puddled up its source; Here tantrums thrash to a whale's rage. This is the pot-hole of old age. Is there no way to cast my hook Out of this dynamited brook? The Fisher's sons must cast about When shallow waters peter out. I will catch Christ with a greased worm, And when the Prince of Darkness stalks My bloodstream to its Stygian term . . . On water the Man-Fisher walks.

She, like all mothers, constantly casts out her thoughts, like fishing lines, towards her children, reminding herself of where they are, what they are doing, how they fare. From habit, while she sits there near the fireplace, some part of her mind is tabulating them and their whereabouts: Judith, upstairs. Susanna, next door. And Hamnet? Her unconscious mind casts, again and again, puzzled by the lack of bite, by the answer she keeps giving it: he is dead, he is gone. And Hamnet? The mind will ask again. At school, at play, out at the river? And Hamnet? And Hamnet? Where is he? Here, she tries to tell herself. Cold and lifeless, on this board, right in front of you. Look, here, see. And Hamnet? Where is he?" Hamnet p.260

For once the stone hits the surface of the pond, the ripples never really stop. The waves diminish, and all seems to return to its previous state, but that’s an illusion. Disturbed fish change their patterns, a snake slides off the muddy bank into the water, a deer bolts into the open to be shot. And the stone remains on the slimy bottom, out of sight but inarguably there, dense and permanent, sediment settling over it, turtles and catfish prodding it, the sun heating it through all the layers of water until that far-off day when, whether lifted by the fingers of a curious boy diving fifty years after it was cast or uncovered by a bone-dumb farmer draining the pond to plant another half acre of cotton, that stone finds its way back up to the light.

There are a dozen factors that make Japanese food so special- ingredient obsession, technical precision, thousands of years of meticulous refinement- but chief among them is one simple concept: specialization. In the Western world, where miso-braised short ribs share menu space with white truffle ceviche, restaurants cast massive nets to try to catch as many fish as possible, but in Japan, the secret to success is choosing one thing and doing it fucking well. Forever. There are people who dedicate their entire lives to grilling beef intestines, slicing blowfish, kneading buckwheat into tangles of chewy noodles- microdisciplines with infinite room for improvement. The concept of shokunin, an artisan deeply and singularly dedicated to his or her craft, is at the core of Japanese culture.

Dead River—the center of some story Grandpa used to tell around the campfire, back when I was foolish enough to believe anything. A tale of a whirlpool, snatching a man under while fishing in the middle of the current, snagging him on a root or treetop, never to be found again. It was the first time I knew the river to be murderous. As we grow closer, the landscape of clay and muddy water fades to a sandy-white shoreline and waters the color of black coffee, due to the influence of tannic acid from the leaves. Spanish moss hangs from nearly every branch, casting long, thick shadows across the sand. The breeze calms to a mere breath of wind, the only movement some water bugs that resemble spiders, darting across the river’s surface. Gone are the splashes of the gar, and the occasional squawk of water fowl. True to its name, the place is sinister. Dead.

I look back on those days and regret none of it, not the risks, not the shame, not the total lack of foresight. The lyric cast of the sun, the teeming fields with tall plants nodding away under the intense midafternoon heat, the squeak of our wooden floors, or the scrape of the clay ashtray pushed ever so lightly on the marble slab that used to sit on my nightstand. I knew that our minutes were numbered, but I didn't dare count them, just as I knew where all this was headed, but I didn't care to read the mileposts. This was a time when I intentionally failed to drop bread crumbs for my return journey; instead, I ate them. He could turn out to be a creep; he could change me or ruin me forever, while time and gossip might ultimately disembowel everything we shared and trim the whole thing down till nothing but fish bones remained. I might miss this day, or I might do far better, but I'd always know that on those afternoons in my bedroom I had held my moment.

By the end of 1865, so-called Black Codes began to forge a new caste system in the South, a segregated world where freed slaves worked as indentured servants, subject to arrest if they left jobs before their annual contracts expired. It was a cruel new form of bondage, establishing the foundations of the Jim Crow system that later ruled southern race relations. In South Carolina, blacks were confined by law to their plantations, forced to work from sunup to sundown. In Florida, blacks who showed “disrespect” to their bosses or rode in public conveyances reserved for whites could be whipped and pilloried. In Mississippi, it became a criminal offense for blacks to hunt or fish, heightening their dependence upon white employers. Thus, within six months of the end of the Civil War, there arose a broadly based retreat from many of the ideals that had motivated the northern war effort, reestablishing the status quo ante and white supremacy in the old Confederacy.

Tis my Mary, my Mary herself! She promised that my boy, every morning, should be carried to the hill to catch the first glimpse of his father's sail! Yes, yes! no more! it is done! we head for Nantucket! Come, my Captain, study out the course, and let us away! See, see! the boy's face from the window! the boy's hand on the hill!" But Ahab's glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. "What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozzening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is as an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky, and this unsounded sea! Look! see yon Albicore! who put it into him to chase and fang that flying-fish? Where do murderers go, man! Who's to doom, when the judge himself is dragged to the bar? But it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky; and the air smells now, as if it blew from a far-away meadow; they have been making hay somewhere under the slopes of the Andes, Starbuck, and the mowers are sleeping among the new- mown hay. Sleeping? Aye, toil we how we may, we all sleep at last on the field. Sleep? Aye, and rust amid greenness; as last year's scythes flung down, and left in the half-cut swaths - Starbuck!" But blanched to a corpse's hue with despair, the Mate had stolen away.

Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales.

1 tablespoon flaked sea salt, like Maldon 2 pieces of salmon fillet with skin on, ⅓ pound each Olive oil Freshly ground black pepper and lemon wedges, for serving Scatter the salt evenly over a dry, well-seasoned 10-inch cast-iron pan. A stainless steel pan will also work. If you’re using a stainless steel pan instead of cast iron, brush the pan lightly with oil before adding the salt. Place the pan over medium-high heat for 3 minutes. While the pan heats, dry the fish fillets well with paper towels and lay them flat on a large plate. Brush with olive oil on both sides. Place the fish into the hot pan, skin side down. Turn the heat down slightly if the crackle sounds too loud and sputtery. Cover with a lid. If you don’t have a lid that fits your pan, a metal baking sheet will do the job. Cook without moving the fillets for 3 to 5 minutes, until the skin is brown and crisp, and releases easily from the pan. Flip the fillets and cook them uncovered for another 2 to 4 minutes, depending on their thickness. The fish is done when the flesh deep inside is still faintly translucent and the internal temperature reads 125 degrees. Serve with freshly ground black pepper and lemon wedges. Serves 2.

Diddy, not really alive, had a life. Hardly the same. Some people are their lives. Others, like Diddy, merely inhabit their lives. Like insecure tenants, never knowing exactly the extent of their property or when the lease will expire. Like unskilled cartographers, drawing and redrawing erroneous maps of an exotic continent. Eventually, for such a person, everything is bound to run dow. The walls sag. Empty spaces bulge between objects. The surfaces of objects sweat, thin out, buckle. The hysterical fluids of fear deposited at the core of objects ooze out along the seams. Deploying things and navigating through space becomes laborious. Too much effort to amble from kitchen to living room, serving drinks, turning on the hi-fi, pretending to be cheerful . . . Everything running down: suffusing the whole of Diddy's well-tended life. Like a house powered by one large generator in the basement. Diddy has an almost palpable sense of the decline of the generator's energy. Or, of the monstrous malfunctioning of that generator, gone amok. Sending forth a torrent of refuse that climbs up into Diddy's life, cluttering all his floor space and overwhelming his pleasant furnishings, so that he's forced to take refuge. Huddle in a narrow corner. But however small the space Diddy means to keep free for himself, it won't remain safe. If solid material can't invade it, then the offensive discharge of the failing or rebellious generator will liquefy; so that it can travel everywhere, spread like a skin. The generator will spew forth a stream of crude oil, grimy and malodorous, that coats all things and persons and objects, the vulgar as well as the precious, the ugly as well as what little still remains beautiful. Befouling Diddy's world and rendering it unusable. Uninhabitable. This deliquescent running-down of everything becomes coexistent with Diddy's entire span of consciousness, undermines his most minimal acts. Getting out of bed is an agony unpromising as the struggles of a fish cast up on the beach, trying to extract life from the meaningless air. Persons who merely have a life customarily move in a dense fluid. That's how they're able to conduct their lives at all. Their living depends on not seeing. But when this fluid evaporates, an uncensored, fetid, appalling underlife is disclosed. Lost continents are brought to view, bearing the ruins of doomed cities, the sparsely fleshed skeletons of ancient creatures immobilized in their death throes, a landscape of unparalleled savagery.

Jonah ’s Prayer “When my life was ebbing away, I remembered you, LORD, and my prayer rose to you, to your holy temple.” JONAH 2:7 NIV Jonah ran from God. He knew where God had directed him to go, but he refused. He thought he knew better than God. He trusted in his own ways over God’s. Where did it get him? He ended up in the belly of a great fish for three days. This was not a punishment but rather a forced retreat! Jonah needed time to think and pray. He came to the end of himself and remembered his Sovereign God. He describes the depths to which he was cast. This was not just physical but emotional as well. Jonah had been in a deep struggle between God’s call and his own will. In verse 6 of his great prayer from the belly of the fish, we read these words: “But you, LORD my God, brought my life up from the pit.” When Joseph reached a point of desperation, he realized that God was his only hope. Have you been there? Not in the belly of a great fish, but in a place where you are made keenly aware that it is time to turn back to God? God loves His children and always stands ready to receive us when we need a second chance. Father, like Jonah I sometimes think my own ways are better than Yours. Help me to be mindful that Your ways are always good and right. Amen.

It wasn’t until she had almost reached its lights that she heard another rider in the hills behind her. Ice slid down Kestrel’s spine. Fear, that the rider was Arin. Fear, at her sudden hope that it was. She pulled Javelin to a stop and swung to the ground. Better to go on foot through the narrow streets to the harbor. Stealth was more important now than speed. Beating hooves echoed in the hills. Closer. She hugged Javelin hard around the neck, then pushed him away while she still could bear to do it. She slapped his rump in an order to head home. Whether he’d go to her villa or Arin’s, she couldn’t say. But he left, and might draw the other rider after him if she was indeed being pursued. She slipped into the city shadows. And it was magic. It was as if the Herrani gods had turned on their own people. No one noticed Kestrel skulking along walls or heard her cracking the thin ice of a puddle. No late-night wanderer looked in her face and saw a Valorian. No one saw the general’s daughter. Kestrel made it to the harbor, down to the docks. Where Arin waited. His breath heaved white clouds into the air. His hair was black with sweat. It hadn’t mattered that Kestrel had been ahead of him on the horse path. Arin had been able to run openly through the city while she had crept through alleys. Their eyes met, and Kestrel felt utterly defenseless. But she had a weapon. He didn’t, not that she could see. Her hand instinctively fell to her knife’s jagged edge. Arin saw. Kestrel wasn’t sure what came first: his quick hurt, so plain and sharp, or her certainty--equally plain, equally sharp--that she could never draw a weapon on him. He straightened from his runner’s crouch. His expression changed. Until it did, Kestrel hadn’t perceived the desperate set of his mouth. She hadn’t recognized the wordless plea until it was gone, and his face aged with something sad. Resigned. Arin glanced away. When he looked back it was as if Kestrel were part of the pier beneath her feet. A sail stitched to a ship. A black current of water. As if she were not there at all. He turned away, walked into the illuminated house of the new Herrani harbormaster, and shut the door behind him. For a moment Kestrel couldn’t move. Then she ran for a fishing boat docked far enough from its fellows that she might cast off from shore unnoticed by an sailors on the other vessels. She leaped onto the deck and took rapid stock of the boat. The tiny cabin was bare of supplies. As she lifted the anchor and uncoiled the rope tethering the boat to its dock, she knew, even if she couldn’t see, that Arin was talking with the harbormaster, distracting him while Kestrel prepared to set sail.

morning to pour out the sugar and substitute salt, thinking it so hilarious until our father lost his temper and spanked us both. The two of us dancing on the Eden patio in my mother’s cast-off nightgowns. Playing mermaid on the beach or fairies on the bluffs. Later, all three of us moving like a school of fish, Josie and Dylan and me, swimming in the cove or making a bonfire or practicing calligraphy with fountain pens my mother brought back from some trip she took with my father during one of their happy stints, an interest bolstered by Dylan’s passion for all things Chinese. Like so many boys of the era, he’d fallen hard for Kwai Chang Caine in the Kung Fu television series. I adored them both, but my sister was first. Worshipped the very air she breathed. I would have done anything she told me—chased down bandits, built a ladder to the moon. In turn, she brought me sand dollars to examine and Pop-Tarts she stole from the pantry in the house kitchen, and she kept her arms around me all night. It was Dylan who introduced surfing. He taught us when I was seven and Josie nine. It gave us both a sense of power and relief, a way to escape our crumbling family life and explore the sea—and, of course, it was our bond with Dylan himself. Josie. Thinking of her in the times before she turned into the later version of herself, the aloof, promiscuous addict, makes me ache with longing. I miss my sister with every molecule

But whether I’m on deck or below it, I’ll never be far.” “Shall I take that as a promise? Or a threat?” She sauntered toward him, hands cocked on her hips in an attitude of provocation. His eyes swept her body, washing her with angry heat. She noted the subtle tensing of his shoulders, the frayed edge of his breath. Even exhausted and hurt, he still wanted her. For a moment, Sophia felt hope flicker to life inside her. Enough for them both. And then, with the work of an instant, he quashed it all. Gray stepped back. He gave a loose shrug and a lazy half-smile. If I don’t care about you, his look said, you can’t possibly hurt me. “Take it however you wish.” “Oh no, you don’t. Don’t you try that move with me.” With trembling fingers, she began unbuttoning her gown. “What the devil are you doing? You think you can just hike up your shift and make-“ “Don’t get excited.” She stripped the bodice down her arms, then set to work unlacing her stays. “I’m merely settling a score. I can’t stand to be in your debt a moment longer.” Soon she was down to her chemise and plucking coins from the purse tucked between her breasts. One, two, three, four, five… “There,” she said, casing the sovereigns on the table. “Six pounds, and”-she fished out a crown-“ten shillings. You owe me the two.” He held up open palms. “Well, I’m afraid I have no coin on me. You’ll have to trust me for it.” “I wouldn’t trust you for anything. Not even two shillings.” He glared at her a moment, then turned on his heel and exited the cabin, banging the door shut behind him. Sophia stared at it, wondering whether she dared stomp after him with her bodice hanging loose around her hips. Before she could act on the obvious affirmative, he stormed back in. “Here.” A pair of coins clattered to the table. “Two shillings. And”-he drew his other hand from behind his back-“your two leaves of paper. I don’t want to be in your debt, either.” The ivory sheets fluttered as he released them. One drifted to the floor. Sophia tugged a banknote from her bosom and threw it on the growing pile. To her annoyance, it made no noise and had correspondingly little dramatic value. In compensation, she raised her voice. “Buy yourself some new boots. Damn you.” “While we’re settling scores, you owe me twenty-odd nights of undisturbed sleep.” “Oh, no,” she said, shaking her head. “We’re even on that regard.” She paused, glaring a hole in his forehead, debating just how hateful she would make this. Very. “You took my innocence,” she said coldly-and completely unfairly, because they both knew she’d given it freely enough. “Yes, and I’d like my jaded sensibilities restored, but there’s no use wishing after rainbows, now is there?” He had a point there. “I suppose we’re squared away then.” “I suppose we are.” “There’s nothing else I owe you?” His eyes were ice. “Not a thing.” But there is, she wanted to shout. I still owe you the truth, if only you’d care enough to ask for it. If only you cared enough for me, to want to know. But he didn’t. He reached for the door. “Wait,” he said. “There is one last thing.” Sophia’s heart pounded as he reached into his breast pocket and withdrew a scrap of white fabric. “There,” he said, unceremoniously casting it atop the pile of coins and notes and paper. “I’m bloody tired of carrying that around.” And then he was gone, leaving Sophia to wrap her arms over her half-naked chest and stare numbly at what he’d discarded. A lace-trimmed handkerchief, embroidered with a neat S.H.

We had something real,” Nobley said, starting to sound a little desperate. “You must have felt it, seeping through the costumes and pretenses.” The brunette nodded. “Seeping through the pretenses? Listen to him, he’s still acting.” Martin turned to the brunette in search of an ally. “Do I detect any jealousy there, my flagpole-like friend?” Nobley said. “Still upset that you weren’t cast as a gentleman? You do make a very good gardener.” Martin took a swing. Nobley ducked and rammed into his body, pushing them both to the ground. The brunette squealed and bounced on the balls of her feet. “Stop it!” Jane pulled at Nobley, then slipped. He put out an arm and caught her midfall across her middle. “Here, let me…” Nobley tried to give her a hand up and push Martin away at the same time. “Get off me,” Martin said. “I’ll help her.” He kicked Nobley in the rear, followed by some swatting of hands. Jane planted her feet, grabbed Nobley’s arm, and pulled him off. Martin was still swiping at Nobley from the ground. Nobley’s cap fell off, then his trench coat twisted up around Martin, who batted at it crazily. “Cut it out!” Jane said, pushing Nobley back and putting herself between them. She felt more like a teacher stopping a schoolboy scuffle than an ingénue with two brawling beaus. “M-m-martin’s gay!” Nobley said. “I am not! You’re thinking of Edgar.” “Who the hell is Edgar?” “You know, that other gardener who always smells of fish.” “Oh, right.” Jane raised her hands in exasperation. “Would you two…” A stuffed-up voice over the PA announced preboarding for Jane’s flight. The brunette made an audible moan of disappointment. Martin struggled to his feet with a hand up from Nobley, and they both stood before Jane, silent, pathetic as wet dogs who want to be let back in the house. She felt very sure of herself just then, tall and sleek and confident. “Well, they’re playing my song, boys,” she said melodically.

Alan, as per his usual routine, got up early and peeked into my rom to check on me. What he found were his teenage stepdaughter and her childhood sweetheart curled up in the same bed, sound asleep and draped all over each other. He hissed my name, alarmed: "Jenna!" "Wha-?" I sat straight up, immediately aware of what was happening and how it all looked. I clambered over Cameron, who was just coming to consciousness, and followed Alan into the kitchen. "It's nothing, I swear," I said in a whisper. If Mom wasn't up yet, I wanted to keep it that way. Alan shook his head. "It looks bad." He glanced toward my bedroom. "Was that Ethan? Tell him to come out here. I want to talk to him." "Um, it's not Ethan. It's Cameron." He put his hands to his head. "Jenna. Jenna." "I know. Is Mom awake?" "Not yet." I kept my voice low. "Can we talk by the fish tank?" He led, I followed. "He came to my window in the night," I explained. "He needed to talk. I let him in. It was me. It was my idea. It was all...nothing happened." "This isn't my area," Alan said, looking at the fish. "Your mom is supposed to do the tough stuff. We have a policy of laissez-faire when it comes to me and...this kind of thing." "Exactly. So," I said hopefully, "go make the coffee and we'll pretend nothing every happened." Cameron came into the room, his blanket wrapped around him. His hair was sticking up in the back, and his long eyelashes hooded sleepy eyes. "I just needed to talk to someone," he said to Alan. "Guess we fell asleep." "Uh-huh." Alan cast an anxious glance toward his and mom's bedroom and said, "You couldn't talk in the kitchen?" "We didn't think about it," I said. "That's how innocent it was, see?" Alan stared at us, still shaking his head. "Look, Cameron, just get out of here before Jenna's mom sees you. Okay?" He nodded. "I'll go get my boots." I breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank you, Alan." When Cameron shut my bedroom door, Alan said, "Jenna. This is the kind of situation that's very, very awkward, to say the least. If your mom were to find out, I would be in scalding hot water." "She won't. Thank you thank you thank you." "Now. I need my coffee." He shuffled off to the kitchen, ankles cracking. "I'm too old for this." Back in my room, I watched Cameron get ready to go, thinking about everything we'd talked about and what it meant. "Where do you live?" I asked. "I'll take you home." "I share a studio apartment with three other guys. It's a dump," he said, lacing up his boots. "How come you were sleeping in my car yesterday?" "Sometimes I don't want to be there." He pulled on his jacket. "I'll go straight to school, shower in the locker room. See you later." He started to open the window. "Wait," I said. "You can use the front door, you know. Just be quiet." "Okay." He paused on his way out of my room, looing back once to say, "Thanks.

Notice that Jesus knows exactly who he is asking to lead his community: a sinner. As all Christian leaders have been, are, and will be, Peter is imperfect. And as all good Christian leaders are, Peter is well aware of his imperfections. The disciples too know who they are getting as their leader. They will not need—or be tempted—to elevate Peter into some semi-divine figure; they have seen him at his worst. Jesus forgives Peter because he loves him, because he knows that his friend needs forgiveness to be free, and because he knows that the leader of his church will need to forgive others many times. And Jesus forgives totally, going beyond what would be expected—going so far as to establish Peter as head of the church.11 It would have made more earthly sense for Jesus to appoint another, non-betraying apostle to head his church. Why give the one who denied him this important leadership role? Why elevate the manifestly sinful one over the rest? One reason may be to show the others what forgiveness is. In this way Jesus embodies the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son, who not only forgives the son, but also, to use a fishing metaphor, goes overboard. Jesus goes beyond forgiving and setting things right. A contemporary equivalent would be a tenured professor stealing money from a university, apologizing, being forgiven by the board of trustees, and then being hired as the school’s president. People would find this extraordinary—and it is. In response, Peter will ultimately offer his willingness to lay down his life for Christ. But on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, he can’t know the future. He can’t understand fully what he is agreeing to. Feed your sheep? Which sheep? The Twelve? The disciples? The whole world? This is often the case for us too. Even if we accept the call we can be confused about where God is leading us. When reporters used to ask the former Jesuit superior general Pedro Arrupe where the Jesuit Order was going, he would say, “I don’t know!” Father Arrupe was willing to follow, even if he didn’t know precisely what God had in mind. Peter says yes to the unknowable, because the question comes from Jesus. Both Christ’s forgiveness and Peter’s response show us love. God’s love is limitless, unconditional, radical. And when we have experienced that love, we can share it. The ability to forgive and to accept forgiveness is an absolute requirement of the Christian life. Conversely, the refusal to forgive leads ineluctably to spiritual death. You may know families in which vindictiveness acts like a cancer, slowly eating away at love. You may know people whose marriages have been destroyed by a refusal to forgive. One of my friends described a couple he knew as “two scorpions in a jar,” both eagerly waiting to sting the other with barbs and hateful comments. We see the communal version of this in countries torn by sectarian violence, where a climate of mutual recrimination and mistrust leads only to increasing levels of pain. The Breakfast by the Sea shows that Jesus lived the forgiveness he preached. Jesus knew that forgiveness is a life-giving force that reconciles, unites, and empowers. The Gospel by the Sea is a gospel of forgiveness, one of the central Christian virtues. It is the radical stance of Jesus, who, when faced with the one who denied him, forgave him and appointed him head of the church, and the man who, in agony on the Cross, forgave his executioners. Forgiveness is a gift to the one who forgives, because it frees from resentment; and to the one who needs forgiveness, because it frees from guilt. Forgiveness is the liberating force that allowed Peter to cast himself into the water at the sound of Jesus’s voice, and it is the energy that gave him a voice with which to testify to his belief in Christ.

Oh, Starbuck! it is a mild, mild wind, and a mild looking sky. On such a day- very much such a sweetness as this- I struck my first whale- a boy-harpooneer of eighteen! Forty- forty- forty years ago!- ago! Forty years of continual whaling! forty years of privation, and peril, and storm-time! forty years on the pitiless sea! for forty years has Ahab forsaken the peaceful land, for forty years to make war on the horrors of the deep! Aye and yes, Starbuck, out of those forty years I have not spent three ashore. When I think of this life I have led; the desolation of solitude it has been; the masoned, walled-town of a Captain’s exclusiveness, which admits but small entrance to any sympathy from the green country without- oh, weariness! heaviness! Guinea-coast slavery of solitary command!- when I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before- and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare- fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!- when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts- away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow- wife? wife?- rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey- more a demon than a man!- aye, aye! what a forty years’ fool- fool- old fool, has old Ahab been! Why this strife of the chase? why weary, and palsy the arm at the oar, and the iron, and the lance? how the richer or better is Ahab now? Behold. Oh, Starbuck! is it not hard, that with this weary load I bear, one poor leg should have been snatched from under me? Here, brush this old hair aside; it blinds me, that I seem to weep. Locks so grey did never grow but from out some ashes! But do I look very old, so very, very old, Starbuck? I feel deadly faint, bowed, and humped, as though I were Adam, staggering beneath the piled centuries since Paradise. God! God! God!- crack my heart!- stave my brain!- mockery! mockery! bitter, biting mockery of grey hairs, have I lived enough joy to wear ye; and seem and feel thus intolerably old? Close! stand close to me, Starbuck; let me look into a human eye; it is better than to gaze into sea or sky; better than to gaze upon God. By the green land; by the bright hearthstone! this is the magic glass, man; I see my wife and my child in thine eye. No, no; stay on board, on board!- lower not when I do; when branded Ahab gives chase to Moby Dick. That hazard shall not be thine. No, no! not with the far away home I see in that eye!” “Oh, my Captain! my Captain! noble soul! grand old heart, after all! why should any one give chase to that hated fish! Away with me! let us fly these deadly waters! let us home! But Ahab’s glance was averted; like a blighted fruit tree he shook, and cast his last, cindered apple to the soil. “What is it, what nameless, inscrutable, unearthly thing is it; what cozening, hidden lord and master, and cruel, remorseless emperor commands me; that against all natural lovings and longings, I so keep pushing, and crowding, and jamming myself on all the time; recklessly making me ready to do what in my own proper, natural heart, I durst not so much as dare? Is Ahab, Ahab? Is it I, God, or who, that lifts this arm? But if the great sun move not of himself; but is an errand-boy in heaven; nor one single star can revolve, but by some invisible power; how then can this one small heart beat; this one small brain think thoughts; unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I. By heaven, man, we are turned round and round in this world, like yonder windlass, and Fate is the handspike.

I cast my eyeball into the depths of space as bait, vision-casting to see the unreal catch life is reeling in for me.

In 1913, as the European powers were busily arming themselves for the First World War, Harry Brearley had the job of investigating metal alloys in order to create improved gun barrels. He was working in one of Sheffield, England’s metallurgy labs, adding different alloying elements to steel, casting specimens, and then mechanically testing them for hardness. Brearley knew that steel was an alloy of iron and carbon, and he also knew that lots of other elements could be added to steel to improve or destroy its properties. No one at the time knew why, so he proceeded by trial and error, melting steels and adding different ingredients in order to discover their effects. One day it was aluminum, the next it was nickel. Brearley made no progress. If a new specimen turned out not to be hard, he chucked it in the corner. His moment of genius came when after a month he walked through the lab and saw a bright glimmer in the pile of rusting specimens. Rather than ignoring it and going to the pub, he fished out this one specimen that had not rusted and realized its significance: he was holding the first piece of stainless steel the world had ever known.

Plains (part III) Down Zabia Street through a Polish city walks Rose in white feathers It’s not a costume ball for a long time the wind will carry feathers from the beds of those departed Their bodies will not leave impressions in the grass of May meadows nor on the waves which shimmer under the saffron fins of fishes their bodies will not leave impressions in the hay when a black lightning bolt of swallows flies with a squawk through an empty barn with dirt floor Their bodies will not leave impressions on any bed sheets Down Zabia Street through a Polish city walks Rose on uneven cobblestones past houses with blue stars and boarded-up windows walks through a temple where stray cats have found their lair She walks amidst the glowing feathers on this black day she walks through your cities neutral Swedes she walks through your homes theaters places of worship she walks through your villages neutral Swiss through your clean towns clean as tears She passed as clouds pass across the sky across the earth without a trace Within me I preserved her heartbeat the silence of her eyes the warmth and hue of her lips the heft of her insides her fleeting thighs in the shadow of love the shape of her head and the reddish dusk of her falling hair and the small sun of her smile She passed as clouds pass but from where is this immeasurably long shadow being cast

Cast further adrift by this subtle urgency, I can feel my precious life ebbing away. Better to be a recluse than a loose wreck, a small fish in a pond instead of lost at sea. Erudition without motivation cuts no ice around here; the extent of my ambition is shabby gentility. The Hate Poems John Tottenham