Trout fishing in America

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“... I've been sitting here ever since like a toad on a log dreaming about Leonardo da Vinci. I dreamt he was on the South Bend Tackle Company payroll, but of course, he was wearing different clothes and speaking with a different accent and possessor of a different childhood, perhaps an American childhood spent in a town like Lordsburg, New Mexico, or Winchester, Virginia. I saw him inventing a new spinning lure for trout fishing in America. I saw him first of all working with his imagination, then with metal and color and hooks, trying a little of this and a little of that, and then adding motion and then taking it away and then coming back again with a different motion, and in the end the lure was invented. He called his bosses in. They looked at the lure and all fainted. Alone, standing over their bodies, he held the lure in his hand and gave it a name. He called it "The Last Supper." Then he went about waking up his bosses.”

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“Thanks, ma'am, he'd said and went out and promptly cut three fingers off his right hand with that medieval machine. I was always very careful with that lawnmower, knowing that somewhere on that place, the ghosts of three fingers were living it up in the grand spook manner. They needed no company from my fingers. My fingers looked just great, right there on my hands.”

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“It was not an outhouse resting upon the imagination. It was reality. An eleven-inch rainbow trout was killed. Its life taken forever from the waters of the earth, by giving it a drink of port wine. It is against the natural order of death for a trout to die by having a drink of port wine.”