Cultivate your garden, clean up your mess

LISTEN. Just spilled hot coffee all over my hand and wrist (and kitchen), maybe I should consider a different method than pour and drip at 5 a.m. But I'm up and woke.

I was finally able to sit down and watch a televised baseball game with real interest, after class yesterday. Cards-Padres, post-"season," never mind (for now) the sea of empty seats. My focus was instead on those green fields, in San Diego and in my imagination. I've missed them badly since March, when David Price took the mound for LA in Arizona just before COVID canceled the Cactus League and snipped the season. It feels good to care about something so inconsequential as a game in the sun. That's what Roger Angell said too, that the caring is why we should let games that don't really matter, matter to us. 

“It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring - caring deeply and passionately, really caring - which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naïveté - the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball - seems a small price to pay for such a gift.” Five Seasons

Angell's a centenarian, we should pay attention to what he says.

So much that we care about in the world feels so fraught and frightening. We need a break. Is that why people play video games? To each their own. For me, Bart Giammatti has the best words:

[Baseball] foster[s] in me again the illusion that there was something abiding, some pattern and some impulse that could come together to make a reality that would resist the corrosion; and because, after it had fostered again that most hungered-for illusion, the game was meant to stop, and betray precisely what it promised.

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

Simplyafan

Our biggest game, the one Bill McKibben asks about in our next Environmental Ethics read Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out, has always come with heartbreak. Lately, though, it's felt closer to a breaking point. "The game's only real goal is to continue itself." My generation is already hearing the Greta Generation's reprimand: You had one job...! 

"It's how you play the game" is, as McKibben says, the truest of cliches. "We assign great meaning to these dramas" because they are our best instructors in how to play the big game the right way.

Today in CoPhi, Pope (Alexander) speaks for Leibniz/Pangloss: "whatever is, is right." But that's wrong, right? No reasonable, sane, sensitive and caring person really believes that nothing is ever wrong. So much is wrong, right now. The "Principle of Sufficient Reason" is wrong, if taken to imply that all's right with the world or that the one we've already got is the best we could possibly have.  Divine providence is wrong if it can do no better than kill and maim innocent victims. Why, for that matter, did I have to burn myself with java this morning?

Ah well, I should stop kvetching and follow Candide's fine advice: cultivate your garden, work your fields. That means do something, don't just sit there. 

Candide and his companions have travelled the world and suffered immensely: they have known persecution, shipwrecks, rapes, earthquakes, smallpox, starvation and torture. But they have – more or less – survived and, in the final pages, find themselves in Turkey – a country Voltaire especially admired – living in a small farm in a suburb of Istanbul. One day they learn of trouble at the Ottoman court: two Viziers and the Mufti have been strangled and several of their associates impaled. The news causes upset and fear in many. But near their farm, Candide, together with his friends Martin and Pangloss, pass an old man who is peacefully and indifferently sitting under an orange bower next to his house... 'people who meddle with politics usually meet a miserable end, and indeed they deserve to. I never bother with what is going on in Constantinople; I only worry about sending the fruits of the garden which I cultivate off to be sold there.’  (BoL, continues)

Cultivating our garden, at this moment, does not afford us the luxury of ignoring the doings in our nation's capitol. We're going to have to mess with politics, that garden's been corrupted and only we can fix it. But the old man's got a point. Do what you can. Don't think all's for the best. If you spill the coffee, clean it up.

We have many other possible discussion topics today, as our reading ranges over Deism, ID (If the human eye was intelligently designed, why do so many of us need glasses?), Hume on miracles and the vanishing self, Rousseau's freedom and chains and "general will," Johnson's "refutation" of Berkeley's idealism, "The Birth of a Nation" screened in Wilson's (very) White House, the Scopes Trial, lots of name-drops we should all now recognize in How the World Thinks (including Socrates and Montaigne on learning to die, Plato, Aristotle, and Descartes on "soul," and these questions: Is it wrong to adopt the religion of your community without questioning it? 207 Can we really author our own lives? Do Americans underrate "contingency" and show too little humility? 208 Is there a breakdown of equilibrium between intimacy and integrity in the west? 214 

But if we have time for just one, I like this: Do you "belong in your hometown"? 215

Thomas Wolfe said you can't go home again (Look Homeward, Angel), but of course you can. After you've got an education and seen Paris, though, do you want to? But isn't home another garden that needs tending? We all need to try and be safe at home.