A fish’s wonder evaporates once it is prepared as food.

Evidence

But the sense of adventure that surrounded the fish here was gone as soon as they were on my plate, white, quivering, salty and full of bones, the same as with the fish that dad and I caught in the sea off Tromøya, or in the sound by the mainland, with a jig, trolling line or pole, that sense left them as soon as they had been prepared for the table and lay on one of our brown lunch plates at home in Tybakken in the 1970s. — Karl Ove Knausgaard, A Death in the Family, 2133

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Knausgaard’s own themes of childhood memory and the gap between experience and domestic life, and to food-writing discussions of provenance disenchantment.