Delight Springs

Saturday, May 21, 2022

Roger Angell

Roger Angell has died. 101. What a terrific age, if you can keep your wits, health, and gratitide. He evidently did, and wrote earlier in his last decade of the challenges and (mostly) delights of growing quite old in a youth-besotted society. He's always been my dependable ally, whenever I felt the need to justify my baseball obsession. He makes it cool to care about "the haphazardous flight of a distant ball." Just to care.

“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

What, after all, is the great world we must care about but a haphazardous ball adrift in the night? 



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