The River Why

'Like gamblers, baseball fans, and television networks, fishermen are enamored of statistics.  The adoration of statistics is a trait so deeply embedded in their nature that even those rarefied anglers the disciples of Jesus couldn't resist backing their yarns with arithmetic:  when the resurrected Christ appears on the morning shore of the Sea of Galilee and directs his forlorn and skunked disciples to  the famous catch of John 21, we learn that the net contained not a "boatload" of fish nor "about a hundred and a half," nor "over a gross," but precisely "a hundred and fifty-three."  This is, it seems to me, one of the most  remarkable statistics ever computed.  Consider the circumstances: this is after the Crucifixion and the Resurrection; Jesus is standing on the beach newly risen from the dead, and it is only the third time the disciples have seen him since the nightmare of Calvary.  And yet we learn that in the net there were "big fish" numbering precisely "a hundred and fifty-three."  How was this digit discovered?  Mustn't it have happened thus: upon hauling the net to shore, the disciples squatted down by that immense, writhing fish pile and started tossing them into a second pile, painstakingly counting "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven..." all the way up to a hundred and fifty- three , while the newly risen Lord of Creation, the Sustainer of their beings, He who died for them and for Whom they would gladly die, stood waiting, ignored till the heap of fish was quantified.  Such is the fisherman's compulsion toward rudimentary mathematics!'
(The above paragraph is from David James Duncan's catchy novel, The River Why, which uses fishing as a way of  thinking about the meaning of life.  I read it in 1983.  Such a terrific read, a 20th anniversary edition was published.)