Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) Read Online Free PDF Page B

billion people inhabit this planet, and supposedly everyone’s fingerprints are different from anyone else’s. Of the many hundreds of baseball games I have watched—perhaps even thousands—nearly every one has had some small detail or event I have never seen in any other game.
    There is pleasure in the new, but also pleasure in the known. The pleasure of eating food one likes, the pleasure of sex. No matter how exotic or complex one’s erotic life might be, an orgasm is an orgasm, and we anticipate them with pleasure because of the pleasure they have given us in the past.
    Still, one does feel rather stupid after spending an entire day in front of a television set watching young men hurl their bodies against one another. The books sit on the table unread. You don’t know where the hours have gone, and, even worse, your team has lost. So I say from Paris, knowing that when the New York football Giants play a crucial playoff game against a tough Philadelphia team tomorrow, I won’t be able to watch—and I am filled with regret.
With a big salute across oceans and continents,
Paul

January 26, 2009
    Dear Paul,
    You seem to treat sport as a mainly aesthetic affair, and the pleasures of sports spectatorship as mainly aesthetic pleasures. I am dubious about this approach, and for a number of reasons. Why is football big business, while ballet—whose aesthetic attractions are surely superior—has to be subsidized? Why is a “sporting” contest between robots of no interest? Why are women less interested in sport than men?
    What the aesthetic approach ignores is the need for heroes that sports satisfy. This need is at its most passionate among boys young enough to have a flourishing fantasy life; I suspect that it is the residue of this juvenile fantasy that fuels adult attachment to sport.
    Insofar as I respond to the aesthetic in sport, it is moments of grace (grace: what a complex word!) that I respond to, moments or movements (another interesting word) that cannot be the issue of rational planning but seem to come down as a kind of blessing from on high upon the mortal players, moments when everything goes right, everything clicks into place, when the lookers-on don’t even want to applaud, just to give silent thanks that they were there as witnesses.
    Yet what athlete would want to be complimented for his grace on the field? Even women athletes would give you a hard look. Grace, gracefulness: effeminate terms.
    If I look into my own heart and ask why in the twilight of my days I am still—sometimes—prepared to spend hours watching cricket on television, I must report that, however absurdly, however wistfully, I continue to look out for moments of heroism, moments of nobility. In other words, the basis of my interest is ethical rather than aesthetic.
    Absurdly because modern professional sport has no interest in the ethical: it responds to our craving for the heroic only with the spectacle of the heroic. “We cried out for bread and you gave us stones.”
    The ubiquity of the postgame interview. The man who for an hour or two threatened to leave us behind, to ascend into that realm—only one step short of the divine—where heroes have their being is compelled to resume his mere earthly status, that is to say, is ritually humiliated. “Yeah,” he is compelled to say, “we worked hard for this, and it paid off. It was a team effort.”
    You don’t work to become a hero. That is to say, what you do in preparation for the heroic contest is not “work,” does not belong to the round of production and consumption. The Spartans at Thermopylae fought together and died together; they were heroes all of them, but they were not a “team” of heroes. A team of heroes is an oxymoron.
All the best,
John

Brooklyn
    February 2, 2009
    Dear John,
    I don’t think we are at odds about this. My letter from Paris was mostly a response to your comments about watching sports on television (a narrow topic, no more than a small