Life & Wisdom Quote by Norman MacCaig

It is not the fish MacCaig is chasing here; it is the vanishing point where other people stop existing. "Nobody within five miles" lands with comic bluntness, but the exaggeration is doing serious work. Five miles is a unit you can almost feel in your legs and lungs. It turns solitude into geography, not mood: an earned perimeter, a small private kingdom of heather, water, and weather.

As a poet of the Scottish landscape, MacCaig often treats nature less as postcard beauty than as a corrective to human noise. Fishing becomes an alibi for attention: the slow, repetitive act that gives the mind permission to empty out and then sharpen. The subtext is lightly anti-social without being misanthropic. He is not condemning people so much as acknowledging what they bring - talk, expectation, performance, the pressure to be "on". The distance is a way to stop being a public self.

There is also a quiet resistance to modern crowding: the sense that even remote places are being domesticated by company, convenience, and constant contact. In that context, the line reads like a defensive charm against intrusion, spoken with a dry Highland wit. The appeal is its honesty. Many writers romanticize loneliness; MacCaig measures it, marks it out, and makes it practical. The joke is that the speaker sounds picky. The deeper implication is that peace now requires planning, even a buffer zone.