A twitch upon the thread

VIRGINIA WOOLF: FISHING FROM THE MOMENT AND OTHER ESSAYS , 1947

What does the fisherman dream? Of all the rivers rushing past – the Eden, the Test, and the Kennet, each river different from the other, each full of shadowy fish, and each fish different from the other; the trout subtle, the salmon ingenious; each with its nerves, with its brain, its mentality which we can dimly penetrate, movements we can mystically anticipate? Or does he dream of the wild Scottish hill in the blizzard; and the patch of windless weather behind the rick, when the pale grasses no longer bent but stood upright; or the vision on top – twenty Whooper swans floating on the loch fearlessly? Or does he dream of poachers with their whisky-stained weather-beaten faces? Or does he dream of places that his ghost will revisit if it ever comes to earth again – of Ramsbury, Highhead, and the Isle of Jura?

But here he wakes ‘with that sense of wellbeing which sleep in the open