The Longest Silence, A Life in Fishing - Thomas McGuane
The Longest Silence is a collection of 40 essays by Thomas McGuane. It covers a lot of territory in the fly-fishing world from trout fishing in the Western Rivers of the United States to fishing for tarpon and permit in the waters of the Florida Keys to salmon fishing in Russia. In these essays he contemplates the progression of the sport and how things like technology and the general competitive nature of our society may be eroding away some of the pleasurable elements of fishing, especially fly fishing, that are more esoteric. His experience in fishing for saltwater species in the sixties and seventies before the sport gained more popularity helps show some of the progression of the sport to where it is today.
He is a skillful and energetic writer; I needed a dictionary near when reading his book as he has quite an impressive vocabulary and is not afraid to use it. His prose is varied, sometimes harder to follow and meandering in his descriptions and maybe some overuse of adjectives while some of his essays are a more minimalistic style of writing I found the essays in the beginning of The Longest Silence to be more the cumbersome and complicated prose; however as I progressed towards the middle and later essays his style seemed to take on a more straight line forward flow as he abated on his overuse of adjectives somewhat.
His essays are often reflective and take on issues that I believe many people who love, not only catching fish, but also the experience of fishing, have contemplated. He speaks of details from the smell of the lacquer on bamboo as you open a rod tube, serenity of a gently flowing river, and the beauty in nature that surrounds us in the remote areas that bring so much more to the experience and how the sport loses much of what we love when it is reduced to single minded focus of out fishing our companions and taking every technological edge to help increase efficiency and catching.
He also speaks of the interesting subject of the place of leisure in our lives and society. Many of the same observations are covered in another book I recently read, Leisure, The Basis of Culture, by Josef Pieper. One quote that I underlined in his essay “Roderick Haig-Brown” is “Americans and probably Canadians are sufficiently tainted by Calvinism to feel that to play is to sin or waste time, so we assuage our guilt by associating ourselves with manufactures so that our days afield reveal the higher purpose of product research, promotion, and development.” I find it interesting how he tackles some of subjects that I think many aficionados of the sport have contemplated at one time or another. It reminds me of the quote by Henry David Thoreau, “Many men go fishing all of their lives without knowing that it is not the fish they are after.”
Some of his writing is also humorous as he describes, quite accurately I may add, the different types that we encounter in fishing lodges around the world. Anyone that has spent time doing “destination fishing” away from their home waters to any extent will be familiar with the characters he describes, and I find it amusing that these types of scenarios that I have encountered evidently play out quite often.
In general I found this book very enjoyable as I was able to pick up on some interesting information that is useful in the pursuit of the sport I love from a technical standpoint; however the most enjoyable aspect of this book is how he put in writing and described so many things I have contemplated myself in my amateur fishing career.