La Piscicoltura di Pura
Cultured Fish, Fish culture
At a distance I saw a waterfall come pouring down off the hill. It was long and white and I could almost feel its cold spray.
There must be a creek there, I thought, and it probably has trout in it.
...
But as I got closer to the creek I could see that
something was wrong. The creek did not act right.
There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motion that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was.
The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees.
I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing.
Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood
I ended up by being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself.
The Reply of Trout Fishing in America:
There was nothing I could do. I couldn't change a flight of stairs into a creek. The boy walked back to where he came from.
The same thing once happened to me. I remember
mistaking an old woman for a trout stream in Vermont, and I had to beg her pardon.
"Excuse me, " I said. "I thought you were a trout stream. "
"I'm not, " she said.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
"Then what's happened to the missiles?" he said.
A new and astounding image appeared in the mirrors.
"They would appear," said Ford doubtfully, "to have turned into a bowl of petunias and a very surprised looking whale..."
"At an Improbability Factor," cut in Eddie, who hadn't changed a bit, "of eight million seven hundred and sixty-‐seven thousand one hundred and twenty-‐eight to one against."
- Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
The old drunk told me about troutfishing. When he could talk, he had a way of describing trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal.
Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
I'd like to get it right.
Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
...
A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
![]()
Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. Th flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots g down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
...
But where is death tonight? All the crudity, odds and ends, this and that, have been crushed like glass splinters into the blue, the red-fringed tide, which, drawing into the shore, fertile with innumerable fish, breaks at our feet.'
Virginia Woolf
The Waves
![Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of Water passing Obstacles and falling, c.1508]()
![Boa Baumann]()
![Cedric Price, The Snowdon Aviary, London Zoo, 1965]()
![Marcel Duchamps, Étant donné]()
Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.
I'd like to get it right.
Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.
...
A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains and tunnels.
Richard Brautigan
Trout Fishing in America
Flower after flower is specked on the depths of green. The petals are harlequins. Stalks rise from the black hollows beneath. Th flowers swim like fish made of light upon the dark, green waters. I hold a stalk in my hand. I am the stalk. My roots g down to the depths of the world, through earth dry with brick, and damp earth, through veins of lead and silver. I am all fibre. All tremors shake me, and the weight of the earth is pressed to my ribs. Up here my eyes are green leaves, unseeing.
...
But where is death tonight? All the crudity, odds and ends, this and that, have been crushed like glass splinters into the blue, the red-fringed tide, which, drawing into the shore, fertile with innumerable fish, breaks at our feet.'
Virginia Woolf
The Waves
