Robert Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish

That a book should never digress is something with which I have never held. Nor does God, who makes whatever He wishes of the 26 letters & His stories work just as well Q-E-D as A-B-C.
The only people who believe in straight roads are generals & mail coach drivers. I believe the King is with me on this one.... Warming to my idea, I put it to the King that this question of roads marks the fundamental divide between the ancient Greek & Roman civilisations. You make a straight road like the Romans & you are lucky to get three words: Veni, vidi, vici. You have a crooked goat path like the Greeks all over the Acropolis & what do you get? The entire damn Odyssey & Oedipus Rex, that's what (p. 164).

AND WHEN I finished the painting & looked at that poor leatherjacket which now lay dead on the table I began to wonder whether, as each fish died, the world was reduced in the amount of love that you might know for such a creature. Whether there was that much less wonder & beauty left to go around as each fish was hauled up in the net. And if we kept on taking & plundering & killing, if the world kept on becoming ever more impoverished of love & wonder & beauty in consequence, what, in the end, would be left?
It began to worry me, you see, this destruction of fish, this attrition of love that we were blindly bringing about, & I imagined a world of the future as a barren sameness in which everyone had gorged so much fish that no more remained, & where Science knew absolutely every species & phylum & genus, but no-one knew love because it had disappeared along with the fish (p. 200-201).

I was later to discover--too late--that like the Commandant, Jorgen Jorgensen suffered a sense of slippage. He had read too many books, & at the age of sixteen, inspired by their tales of romance & adventure, had one day in 1798 ventured out from his hometown of Copenhagen only to discover that the world did not correspond to anything he had read.
Things were rupturing & nothing held. Books were solid, yet time was molten. Books were consistent, yet people were not. Books dealt in cause & effect, yet life was inexplicable disorder. Nothing was as it was in a book, something about which he forever after harboured a dull resentment that finally found expression as vengeance (p. 251).

I wanted to tell a story of love as I slowly killed those fish, & it didn't seem right that I was slowly killing fish in order to tell such a story, & I found myself beginning to talk to the dying fish as their movements grew sluggardly, as their brains slowly ceased working from lack of oxygen.
I told them all about me, about being a bad bastard who forged himself anew as a worse painter, but a painter nevertheless. I wanted to tell a story of love as I slowly killed those fish, & I told them how my paintings were not meant for Science or Art, but for people, to make people laugh, to make people think, to give people company & give them hope & remind them of those they had loved & those who loved them yet, beyond the ocean, beyond death, how it seemed when I was painting important to paint that way (Robert Flanagan. Gould's Book of Fish. New York: Grove Press, 2001, p. 386).