The remembered quality of an experience, not its yield, is what endures

Evidence

I shall now confess to you that none of those three trout had to be beheaded, or folded double, to fit their casket. What was big was not the trout, but the chance. What was full was not my creel, but my memory. Like the white-throats, I had forgotten it would ever again be aught but morning on the Fork. — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 152

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Connects to the polyad’s valuing observation-as-method — the small catch still fills memory, echoing the almanac’s whole method of finding abundance in attentive attention rather than yield.
• XREF: connects to: Obscured sounds and sights lodge deeper in memory than obvious ones — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 193; Uncertain rewards generate more attention and attachment than guaranteed ones — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 194