The Weekend Eudemon
Big weekend for big men. NFL's opening season and Notre Dame v. Michigan. I graduated from both schools and I'm Catholic, but I root for Michigan. It's not uncommon. I was a Michigan fan while growing up, and I obtained my bachelor's degree (in history and taxi cab driving) from Michigan. I went to N.D. to get my law degree. Most people keep their loyalties to their undergraduate institution. I'm no different.
Readers of this blog probably don't know that I'm a pretty big sports fan. I try to keep away from that topic, but I've often considered making sports commentary a side feature, kind of like “Brews You Can Use” or “Odd Consumer News.”
It wouldn't be terribly unusual to combine an interest in culture, history, literature, current affairs, and Catholicism with an occasional sports slant. Indeed, if a person wants to comment on American culture and current affairs, he should probably be prepared to write at least a little on sports.
I wouldn't be the first person to combine these interests. Many intellectuals (of which I am not one, but pretend to be) combine an interest in “higher” disciplines with an interest in sports. Willmoore Kendall immediately comes to mind, but one of the best examples is James V. Schall, Professor of Government at Georgetown and author of over a dozen books.
In his modern classic, On the Unseriousness of Human Affairs, he wrote of sports:
In caring more for watching a game of football than playing it, we attest, I think, to a kind of wonder, a kind of fascination about something taking place before us that absorbs our attention, if only for a moment. . . Good games and sporting events are the normal and symbolic experiences most people have that might teach them to understand something of God, to understand how something could be for its own sake. This experience teaches us how it is possible that something we might contemplate is something we might contemplate forever if it were forever fascinating. . . .
[Aristotle thought play] and contemplation were alike in that both were activities indulged in “for their own sakes,” whereas business and work were for something else. Games need not exist, just as the world need not exist, but both do. . . [W]atching a good game can be fascinating. It is its own world and time. It absorbs our attention in something that is not ourselves. Aristotle thought that our relation to God was not unlike that experience. . . .
Cheering and praising have this in common: they are responses to and recognitions of a beauty and glory that is outside us and that we behold.
Schall is right. Sports, if only indirectly and weakly, point toward the higher things. Kind of like this blog (with an emphasis on “indirectly and weakly”).
Therefore, readers of this blog can expect to start seeing sports commentary, but not much. It'll be occasional, and I'll make sure the sports don't overrun the regular commentary. Just as I like sports, I also think they're horribly abused in today's culture, from traveling teams for children to the billion-dollar industry known as the NFL. In turn, sports abuse the culture, from dashed family time to dastardly athletes who set poor examples and further our culture's plunge into the toilet. But sports won't abuse this blog.
Go Michigan! (seven-point favorite)
Malcolm's Messages (What's this?)
Chapter 3: Malcolm Goes Noontide
Malcolm walked many miles and many days. He passed a brothel, a daycare center, a hash house, and a parlor of bodily desecration. He saw ten thousand faces. He gave a young man money to buy a fork, since the man had only a knife. He gave a pretty woman money to buy some clothes and did not understand her proposal to repay him. He saw people give coins to the naiads and it made him happy to know those fine creatures, jailed within concrete, were not forgotten.
He came to a bundle of tall buildings. And in the middle of the buildings was an expanse of gray ground, like the Triangle, with spots of grass and isolated trees and benches and a few tables. There a juggler juggled. And a man playing guitar like the man in the Triangle. People ate there when noontide swelled. And there was no "no loitering" sign. And Malcolm thought it good.
He went there for one hundred years, at noontide, with a lunch, and ate. He exchanged pleasantries with the other eaters. He gained their trust, establishing a familiarity with them bordering on something akin to friendship. He did this until there was enough acquaintance to make humiliation among them painful.
