Since yesterday’s blog post www.tinyurl.com/henrydavid we have recieved some good responses as well as “expert testimony” which prove that Henry David Thoreau was not the originator of the following famous fishing quote:
“Many Men Go Fishing Their Entire Lives Without Knowing It Is Not Fish They Are After.”
Drop this quote or one of it’s many variants into Google and you’ll get over 2 million hits. Many that we’ve read attribute this wonderful passage to Henry David Thoreau, one of the most important naturalists and writers in our history.
Well, while this quote is beautiful and evokes the meaning and depth of what it means to be a fisher, it looks like Henry was not the originator. Over the years it seems that we as fishers have collectively Thoreau’n ourselves a curveball. We have transferred our ability to tell massive, truth stretching fish stories to the world of quotes and literature.
The first reader to reach this conclusion was Greg Harris aka “The Idaho Caddis”. Greg is is the 2nd Vice President of the Fly Fishers of Idaho. He sent us this link to the Thoreau Institute’s page of HDT Misquotations . Thanks Greg!
We had also put an inquiry into the Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods. The Institute’s webpage is www.walden.org . Their curator of collections and Thoreau scholar Jeffrey Cramer was kind enough to email StoneFly Vineyards with his position on this matter. Pasted below is the fascinating series of emails, pasted into this post with the permission of Jeffrey and the Thoreau Institute.
Dear StoneFly Nick,
I just wanted to follow up on our conversation about the quotation, “Many men fish all their lives without ever realizing that it is not the fish they are after.” (Variant: “Many go fishing all their lives without knowing that it is not fish they are after.”)
Although it has been attributed to Thoreau in many places, particularly on the Internet, it was definitely not written by him. It is probably based on the following passage from his Journal of 26 September 1853:
It is remarkable that many men will go with eagerness to Walden Pond in the winter to fish for pickerel and yet not seem to care for the landscape. Of course it cannot be merely for the pickerel they may catch; there is some adventure in it; but any love of nature which they may feel is certainly very slight and indefinite. They call it going a-fishing, and so indeed it is, though perchance, their natures know better. Now I go a-fishing and a-hunting every day, but omit the fish and the game, which are the least important part. I have learned to do without them. They were indispensable only as long as I was a boy. I am encouraged when I see a dozen villagers drawn to Walden Pond to spend a day in fishing through the ice, and suspect that I have more fellows than I knew, but I am disappointed and surprised to find that they lay so much stress on the fish which they catch or fail to catch, and on nothing else, as if there were nothing else to be caught.
The closest parallel in a non-Thoreau text is from E.T. Brown’s Not Without Prejudice: Essays on Assorted Subjects (Melbourne: Cheshire, 1955) p. 142: “When they go fishing, it is not really fish they are after. It is a philosophic meditation.” There may be other non-Thoreau variants but I haven’t found them yet.
Being immersed in Thoreau’s life and works on a daily basis here at the Thoreau Institute, having read him for a lifetime and published several works on Thoreau, I can without hesitation say that there is no doubt that the quotation is not Thoreau’s.
Here’s a little information on the Institute: The Thoreau Institute at Walden Woods Library is a non-for-profit research center that collects research materials relating to Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), his historical context, and his contemporary relevance to environmental and human-rights issues. It provides the most comprehensive body of Thoreau-related material available in one place, consisting of 8,000 books and over 60,000 items, including manuscripts, clippings, articles, correspondence of Thoreau scholars, photographs, maps and surveys, personal histories, slides, scrapbooks, ephemera, and realia. The Institute is owned and managed by the Walden Woods Project, which preserves the land, literature and legacy of Henry David Thoreau by fostering an ethic of environmental stewardship and social responsibility. The Project accomplishes this mission through the integration of conservation, education, and research. Our website is: www.walden.org.
And then the follow-up email:
Dear StoneFly Nick
Nick, I’ve tracked the misquotation to a writer named Michael Baughman, who wrote in A River Seen Right (Lyons Press, 1995), probably mis-remembering the journal passage: “I think it was in Walden where he wrote that a lot of men fish all their lives without ever realizing that fish isn’t really what they’re after.” I’m fairly confident that this is where it all started.
Thanks to Jeff and to Greg for helping to clear up the truth on this matter. And given that we at StoneFly Vineyards winery were about to use this quote in one of our booklets and attribute to Thoreau we have learned a good lesson in doing our research before incorporating common quotes and passages into our materials.
StoneFly Nick
