Forgotten Treasures #14: Speckled Trout--PART 3

"Daniel-San" (Rot13) wrote in message
. ..

"Wolfgang" wrote ...

"Daniel-San" wrote ...

Thanks for the pleasant read. Yesterday (and it seems today) in the
Chicago area, we were treated to an amazing day, weather-wise. High 60s,
mild breeze, lots of rejuvenating sun. Just what a boy needs after
Wisconsin's trout season has ended....a day *perfect* for fishing. So,
as the jones built, I saw this posted. Not a total assuaging of said
jones, but close.

Well, you're in good company, anyway:

"The man's true life, for which he consents to live, lies altogether in
the field of fancy. The clergyman, in his spare hours, may be winning
battles, the farmer sailing ships, the banker reaping triumph in the
arts: all leading another life, plying another trade from that they
chose....For no man lives in the external truth, among salts and acids,
but in the warm, phantasmagoric chamber of his brain, with the painted
windows and storied walls."--R.L. Stevenson

Quoted in, "Exuberance: The Passion For Life" by Kay Redfield Jamison,
Alfred A. Knopf, 2004, p. 86.

"Snoopy, " Jamison goes on to say, "dining by candlelight on the top of
his doghouse, with his stained-glass window and van Gogh below, would
agree."

Hells bells, it seems Thurber stole Mitty from Stevenson. Well, perhaps
not "stole," but the idea is certainly there.

I looked for the original source of the quote after I posted it. Well, one
thing led to another and I never quite got there......you know how that
goes......but I found a reference that suggested Stevenson was alluding
(however indirectly) to a certain gentleman of La Mancha. Seems that rather
than committing outright theft from an origianl owner Thurber was (ala
Shakespeare) just recycling an already well used idea. An enterprising
scholar could (and probably already did) make a career of listing everybody
who flogged it before Cervantes got hold of it.

Never read much of Stevenson; perhaps I should.

While in college (getting to be a while ago now despite the fact that I got
there a decade and a half after my high school classmates) I made a
concerted effort to work my way through the great 19th century American and
English authors. There turned out to be a lot more of them than I expected
and most of them were alarmingly prolific. Needless to say, perhaps, but I
didn't get very far. But I DID manage to get through Twain, Irving,
Stevenson and Dickens (blech!).....and maybe a couple of works each by some
lesser luminaries like Hawthorne and Cooper. Stevenson is definitely worth
the time.

Michelle and I often discuss this very idea. She usually catches me
flipping through a well-worn copy of one of the many Calvin and Hobbes
anthologies that dot my book collection, which leads to a discussion of
Mitty and the whole idea of the internal life, separate from the external.
Usually makes for an interesting discussion...ranging from your basic
daydream (which I believe to be a "healthy" expression of simple desires)
to the secret lives some people live (not so healthy, IMO...)

Well, the whole idea of reading books (indisputably one of the most salutary
of human activities) outside one's own professional specialty is Mittyish to
the core. The self-referential irony in Mitty couldn't possibly have been
lost on Thurber. Reading is simply a manifestation (albeit with a bit of
mechanical aid) of your healthy daydreaming. Writing, on the other hand,
represents (if we are to give credence to the evidence of practioners' own
statements as well as the testimony of innumerable eyewitnesses) those not
so healthy and all too infrequently secret lives.

Anyway... it's about 65 or so outside, and mentally, I'm a little west of
Madison, casting a little sedge over a rising trout.

Try the Pass Lake......trust me.

Physically, I'm sitting inside my little carrel reading a surprisingly
intersting union journal from the 1920s. Great stuff.

Um.....yeah, that HAS TO be better than it sounds!

Wolfgang