Living Silver 



out convinced him only of his ignorance. It taught him nothing 

 but his part in shooting a trawl and in gutting a haddock. Its chief 

 use in his later life was that it forced him into understanding his 

 ignorance and determined him to overcome it. He made up his 

 mind to find out as much about fish as these old boys knew who 

 had been born with it growing out of their backsides. The first 

 step towards this knowledge was obviously to learn which fish was 

 which and, when he got back after that first day's trawling, he 

 started on a self-disciplined course of haunting the fish-markets 

 and asking foolish questions. 



It was an uncomfortable course. (By this time he had resigned 

 himself to the fact that everything about fishing was uncomfortable 

 though he had not therefore resolved that his life would not be 

 spent in fishing.) He had to rise at six in the morning; he had to 

 go down to the fish-market ; and he had to reach it before business 

 started. The auctions began at eight and Jan was usually messing 

 about by seven of a cold morning. 



Concrete and ice. There was nothing else. There were no fish, 

 no men, no ships. There was only the mile of concrete covered 

 with melting or unmelted ice. Everything was so strange. He 

 went down to look at fish but all he saw was the concrete and ice. 

 And no wonder. There are few places like Aberdeen fish-market 

 to impress a man with the magnitude of humanly constructed 

 dimensions. The Forum of Rome seems paltry beside it, a nig- 

 gardly piece of pompous impressionism. The great factories of 

 our time do not have the simplicity of structure that allows us to 

 view them all at once, to be impressed by a single glance, to see 

 the size of the accomplishment in anything other than homeopathic 

 doses. The very size of most modern buildings demands that we 

 be kept away from the concept of their size. Otherwise we would 

 be intimidated and unable to work in them. But a fishmarket is 

 not divided into sections. It has no plush offices, few hygienical 

 cubicles, no counting rooms, no assembly plants, no divisions 

 whatever. There is nowhere for a man to hide himself. There is 

 only length and breadth and height, and the steel pillars that sup- 



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