Explore "The Island of Desire" by Robert Dean Frisbie on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
When a man gets in the fishing mood it's no use discussing any other subject with him or trying to set right his sense of values. He wants to catch a fish--preferably a big fish--and that's all there is to it, and that's all there is worth living for. Our savants tell us he is trying to give vent to his agressive impulse in a harmless way; but what does the fisherman care for all the savants from Sarawak to Samarkand? Whoever heard of a savant catching a fish? What do they know about it, anyway?
Desire knows more about the psychology of a fisherman than all the savants lumped together, and that's because she is the wife of a fisherman who once caught a patuki-wala weighing two hundred and forty-six pounds! Even my daughter Johnny knows enough to look at me with sighing pity--and keep her mouth shut--when I am going fishing.