My favorite secular holiday

The impulse to re-read Richard Ford's Independence Day is significant here...

The impulse to read Self-Reliance is significant here, as is the holiday itself —my favorite secular one for being public and for its implicit goal of leaving us only as it found us: free.

And we're as free as can be this year on the 4th, in the Magic Kingdom.

Richard Ford

Happy birthday to one of my favorite writers, Richard Ford, who has an interesting response to critics who think some of his characters are too thoughtfully complex or "philosophical."

"Some critics have occasionally suggested that I impose on characters certain possibilities of thought or language or emotional experience, which that particular character, or to put it more gruesomely, those kinds of characters wouldn't likely be able to think or talk about. But my attitude is that there are no such things as kinds or types of characters in fiction or in life. Eloquence or penetrating understanding can visit anybody. In fact, it's fiction's business to try to enlarge our understanding of and sympathy for people. If to do that I have to strain your conventional understanding about humans — well that's also art's proper business and my hope is that I'll repay your indulgence."

And,

"The thing about being a writer is that you never have to ask, 'Am I doing something that's worthwhile?' Because even if you fail at it, you know that it's worth doing." Writer's Almanac

 On good days I say the same about teaching.

free

Every July 4 since its publication a decade and a half ago, I've been pulling out and pondering Independence Day, Richard Ford's marvelous paean to freedom in all its personal, political, and philosophical glory.

Give us liberty!

optimist's holiday

Best Easter-setting novel ever, Richard Ford's The Sportswriter. I'm going to go lie down now and re-read it.

Independence Day

Best book ever on the general theme of independence: Richard Ford's Independence Day. (Ford himself prefers Emerson's Self-reliance for "its implicit goal of leaving us as it found us: free.")

It's a great road book, too. The action centers on Cooperstown and the baseball hall of fame. It reflects wisely on just how much, and how little, any of us can help anyone else (our own kids included) be free.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion;…The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Self Reliance,"
Essays, First Series, 1841.

Gratitude

Thanksgiving is one of my two favorite holidays, the other being Independence Day.

Richard Ford's wonderful novel The Lay of the Land (Knopf, '06) expresses much of my feeling about this day, and about the hard-won "acceptance" that comes with loving life while still deploring loss. I love and accept a lot, but not everything: so, on some accounts, I thus lack the deepest form of gratitude and spirituality. But I agree with Ford: "a practical acceptance of what's what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it..."

Another of my favorite sources on this topic is the philosopher Loyal Rue, who has written:

By the grace of these improbable [cosmic] events we inherit the opportunity of a lifetime. Even if we cannot imagine some One to give thanks to, we are nonetheless rendered thankful by the bountiful conditions of our existence. And in the measure of our gratitude we acquire a sense of obligation. The more we learn about the Epic of Evolution the more we are motivated to repay the generosity of the past by seeding hope for the future. http://www.earthlight.org/personal26.html

In other words: pay it forward.

Gratitude

David Halberstam died yesterday in an automobile accident in California. He was a first-rate journalist and author, best known for The Best and the Brightest. My favorite Halberstam work is The Children, an account of the courageous college students who organized protests in Nashville and elsewhere in the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. I also like his baseball books, especially his account of the 1964 season that culminated in a Cards-Yanks World Series. I'm grateful for Halberstam's life and contribution,.

Halberstam's death seems an appropriate occasion to express my gratitude for another personal hero who left us too soon, Robert Solomon.

I'm on record as being generally unimpressed by the the academic/philosophical/Continental expression of Existentialism, much preferring literary versions like Walker Percy's and Richard Ford's. But I make an exception for Solomon, the University of Texas philosopher who collapsed and died in a Swiss airport in January.

Gratitude was one of Solomon's recurrent themes:
Gratitude, I want to suggest, is not only the best answer to the tragedies of life. It is the best approach to life itself. This is not to say, as I keep insisting, an excuse for quietism or resignation. It is no reason to see ourselves simply as passive recipients and not as active participants full of responsibilities. On the contrary, as Kant and Nietzsche among many others insisted, being born with talents and having opportunities imposes a heavy duty on us, to exercise those talents and make good use of those opportunities. It is also odd and unfortunate that we take the blessings of life for granted -- or insist that we deserve them -- but then take special offense at the bad things in life, as if we could not possibly deserve those. The proper recognition of tragedy and the tragic sense of life is not shaking one's fist at the gods or the universe "in scorn and defiance" but rather, as Kierkegaard writes in a religious context, "going down one one's knees" and giving thanks. Whether or not there is a God or there are gods to be thanked, however, seems not the issue to me. It is the importance and the significance of being thankful, to whomever or whatever, for life itself.
-Robert C. Solomon, "Spirituality for the Skeptic" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Carlin Romano wrote last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Above all, Solomon exuded appetite, endless appetite, for philosophy that matters, problems, in the Jamesian sense, that make a difference for real people.

Halberstam and Solomon, thankfully, left us a legacy of words and ideas by which we can continue to be instructed and inspired, and for which I am profoundly grateful.

Talking and Living

My building at ESU yesterday was host to two noteworthy academic occasions:

1. Our department sponsored an address by a charming visitor from Chicago, who explained at length (and diagrammed) the structure of racial and sexual oppression in America. He used many words to say that black women have it worse than black men and whites generally. His thesis was almost too true to be good, too obvious to profit from theoretical elaboration. The ensuing trans-gender, poly-ethnic Q-&-A discussion was constructive, but on the whole I was reminded of what Richard Ford said (noted in Tuesday's post) about the futility of exhaustive explanations. The post-talk reception in our department chair's back yard, though, under a gorgeous moon on a perfect early spring evening with terrific food and drink and uninhibited conversation among good people, was more than worthwhile. I enjoy my friends and colleagues (and, btw, am pleased to report that they will continue to be my colleagues for the foreseeable future).

2. The English department sponsored a conference on Baseball in Literature and Culture. The luncheon speaker was the infamous old Detroit Tigers pitcher Denny McLain, who was villainous when I was 11 years old because he helped defeat my Cards in the '68 World Series... and villainous later too, accused of racketeering, extortion, conspiracy, theft, money laundering, and mail fraud. He spent six years in prison. But his talk was all baseball. McLain had disturbing things to say about Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin (Martin "killed" Mantle) and Boog Powell (he broke Powell's hand with a "purpose pitch") and my hero Bob Gibson (he "hates America" but was a great pitcher).

I attended a session in the afternoon on the incredible old Negro Leagues star Satchel Paige (who was finally given an opportunity to pitch in the major leagues, and pitched well, at age 59). Paige said: "Age is a case of mind over matter, if you don't mind it don't matter." And: "How old would you be if you didn't know how old you were?" Well, he was 75 (though his birth certificate apparently cannot be located to confirm this) when felled by emphysema. Smoking is not a good idea if you want to pitch forever, as Satch once proposed to do.

I spoke a few years ago at the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, saying in part: "I suppose we are all here because we love to talk about baseball. Yet, and perhaps paradoxically, those of us who are most enthusiastic about baseball know that talk about it is ultimately incapable of bearing its own weight... personal enthusiasms run deep, to a place beyond talk and the objectifying intellect." It was fun to visit the Hall of Fame and meet fellow enthusiasts, but in the end I'm still with Ford: we need to "leave off explaining" and get on with living. "What an awful trade that of professor is," William James complained at term's end in 1892, "paid to talk, talk, talk! . . . It would be an awful universe if everything could be converted into words, words, words." And yet, he came back to teach again in the Fall. As will I.

So, in the name of leaving off explaining and getting on with living: our daughter's little league season opener is tonight (she's the only girl on her team of "Diamondbacks") and I intend to enjoy it, not explain it. Happy Opening Day!

Richard Ford

My old friend at ESU in Alabama (we go way back, to before the Sellars-Quine Kitchen Debate mentioned a couple of posts ago) and I recently were discussing a mutual favorite, novelist Richard Ford. Ford, A. noted, is a masterful chronicler of the often-riveting varieties of ways in which his Everyman heroes (and we) try and fail to lose ourselves in the everydayness of quotidian life. (Like me, I think, A. prefers the Existentialism of fiction to that of philosophy.)

Ford's Frank Bascombe has now taken the stage in three outstanding novels, with the publication last fall of Lay of the Land. He is an older, wiser, more secular Binx Bolling (Walker Percy's "seeker" in The Moviegoer), who comes at last to understand that "a practical acceptance of what's what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it." And: "Here is necessity... to live it out."

Bascombe, now more-than-slightly past mid-life and momentarily weary of becoming, hungers for necessity ("something solid, the thing ‘character’ stands in for") and Permanence. The trouble is, "Permanence can be scary. Even though it solves the problem of tiresome becoming, it can also erode optimism, render possibility small and remote... down deep inside [to] become just an organism... This you need to save yourself from, or else the slide off the transom of life’s pleasure boat becomes irresistible and probably a good idea."

I met Ford about ten years ago, and expressed to him my admiration for a particular passage in the first Bascombe tale The Sportswriter (1986)--

"Real mystery—the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book—was to them [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away—live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble. . . "Some things can't be explained. They just are. . . . It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that . . . for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life."

Such a stance is easier to sustain, of course, if you are a former teacher who has achieved subsequent success in other endeavors (fiction writing, for instance). But its wisdom occurs to me in the classroom just about every day, usually smack in the middle of an explanation.

In a future post I'll discuss the middle Bascombe book Independence Day (1995) and its striking parental wisdom -- striking in part because Ford is not a parent himself.