Reading literature from the 17th century doesn’t exactly restore my soul, but it does restore my sense of proportion.
I’ve been reading Izaak Walton’s The Compleat Angler. The book spends a chapter on each type of gamefish. (Trout are so wonderful they get two chapters.) Walton’s character Piscator, who is teaching his scholar the art of angling, gives us the natural history of each fish and then tells us how to catch it. Sometimes we get recipes.
The first edition was published in 1653. Pliny’s theory that worms generated spontaneously from natural decay was still popular. So was the view that pike sometimes spring from pickerel weed.
Some of the confusion about natural history can be dismissed with a smile. But it would take an expert to sort out some of the muddles.
Some immature forms of salmon were thought to be trout in those days. And what are we to make of the observation that some eels don’t hatch from eggs but are born live? Today, I think — but am not certain — that an expert would say that eels hatch from eggs, but some fish that look like eels have young that are born live. I don’t have the expertise to handle that question. I don’t have the expertise to handle half the questions the book raises about the biology of fish, worms and flies.
The interesting thing is not that one of the culture’s great books on fishing is wrong. The interesting thing is how hard we humans have to work to get things right.
I’m constantly reminded how little I know about the natural world. Had I lived in Walton’s day, I’d have been catching young salmon and calling them trout. But I’m also determined to make myself a little less ignorant. I make it a point to get into the woods regularly. I want to look for myself and bring back questions to research.
Walton called that kind of learning “search and conference” — taking a look for yourself and then having a conversation with others who were seeking answers. He called it one of life’s pleasures.
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