Hello friends! This week, some slightly-bridled enthusiasm for Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding. ⚾️ I may or may not cry at the end of this video.
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The real cycle you're working on is a cycle called 'yourself' ... Working on a motorcycle, working well, caring, is to become part of a process, to achieve an inner peace of mind. The motorcycle is primarily a mental phenomenon.
— Robert M. Persig
Four years ago, I introduced the Wisdom Workshop to YouTube by sharing when I fell in love with philosophy: If you only read one book, THIS might be the one: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. I read the book when I was 15. An “Inquiry Into Values,” Persig’s classic asks us to explore the art of living a quality life.
Persig asks: What is Quality? How can we become the highest quality of ourselves? How can we learn to appreciate the quality of each moment?
It’s in this tradition of existential inquiry that we have Chad Harbach’s The Art of Fielding, a book about baseball that isn’t really about baseball. Or, it is about baseball if baseball “is primarily a mental phenomenon.” Harbach writes:
You loved it because you considered it an art: an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude, which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Top Ten Provocations from The Art of Fielding
Instead of “motorcycle maintenance," Harbach uses the art of becoming a shortstop to examine existential questions about excellence, death, and what makes a life well-lived. Here’s my ten favorite provocations from the book.
10. How we see someone affects the way they behave
The way people look back at us affects us, too. The quality of our gaze — how we look at the world and how we look at each other — may be the most important freedom.
Sometimes a cloudless swatch of sky would blow past the moon, and Pella could see the outlines of Mike's face in slightly sharper relief. It was strange the way he loved her — a side-long and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention . . . With David and every guy before David, what passed for love had always been eye to eye, nose to nose. She felt watched, observed, like the prize inhabitant at a zoo, and she wound up pacing, preening, watching back to fit the part. Whereas Mike was always beside her. She would stand at the kitchen window and look out at the quad, at the Melville statue and beyond that beach and the rolling Lake, and realize that Mike, for however long, had been standing beside her, staring at the same thing.
So beautifully perceptive. ✍️Q: What if we had a more generous vision of each other? Of ourselves? Of our shared future, and stood side-by-side to face it? What do you see? Is anyone seeing it with you?
9. How we “field” our experience matters
The ball is coming right at you. How do you react?
To field the ground ball must be considered a generous act and an act of comprehension. One moves not against the ball, but with it. Bad fielders stab at the ball like an enemy. This is antagonism. The true fielder lets the path of the ball become his own path, thereby comprehending the ball and dissipating the self, which is the source of all suffering and poor defense.
This one reminds me of Zen in the Art of Archery from Herrigel— a beautiful reminder to befriend the universe. ✍️Q: How can you move with the universe, instead of against it? What’s preventing you from dissipating the self that is the source of suffering?
8. Can we return to thoughtless being?
The lead character — Henry — models his behavior after a sage-like shortstop, Arapacio Rodriguez, who wrote a fictional Art of Fielding, from which Harbach named his novel.
There are three stages: thoughtless being, thought, and return to thoughtless being. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.
The more involved you get, the more thought assembles. Particularly when there's scouts watching. ✍️Q: Where can you return to that original state of innocence? How do you enter your own beginners mind?
7. On good coaching vs. bad coaching
It’s about choice, suffering, and sense-making:
Schwartz knew that people loved to suffer, as long as the suffering made sense. Everybody suffered. The key was to choose the form of your suffering. Most people couldn't do this alone. They needed a coach. A good coach made you suffer in a way that suited you. A bad coach made everyone suffer the same way, and so was more like a torturer.
This is so cool. Touches on the frontiers of Stelter’s Third-Generation Coaching: Narrative-Collaborative Theory and Practice. Good coaches help you tell a better life story. ✍️Q: What stories are you telling yourself about yourself? What stories do you wish others would tell about you?
6. The recurring rituals of good domestic life
Nietzsche's myth of the eternal return meets rituals of bliss:
Owen always picked the same two mugs and even presumably went so far as to rinse them in the sink when they were dirty. Such consistency suggested, or seemed to suggest, that Owen found their afternoons worth repeating even down to the smallest detail. This was the dreamy paradisiacal side of domestic ritual when all the days were possessed of the same minutia precisely because you wanted them to be.
In sport and in life, there’s magic in repetition. ✍️Q: Can you construct your days in such a way that you would want to repeat them over and over again? What might that look like for you in this season of your life?
5. On the paradox of high performance
On natural genius and the consistency of excellence:
Henry would be chiseled and resolute. His eyes hardened, his curls shaved down to a military half inch. The making of a ball player: the production of brute efficiency out of natural genius. This formed the paradox at the heart of baseball or football or any other sport. You loved it because you considered it an art, an apparently pointless affair, undertaken by people with a special aptitude which sidestepped attempts to paraphrase its value, yet somehow seemed to communicate something true or even crucial about the Human Condition. The Human Condition being basically that we're alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.
Baseball was an art, but to excel at it, you had to become a machine. It didn't matter how beautifully you performed sometimes, what you did on your best day, how many spectacular plays you made. You weren't a painter or a writer. You didn't work in private and discard your mistakes. And it wasn't just your masterpieces that counted. What mattered for any machine was repeatability. Moments of inspiration were nothing compared to the elimination of error. The scouts cared little for Henry's superhuman grace, and so far as they cared for that, they were suckered in aesthetes and shitty scouts. Can you perform on demand, like a car or a furnace or like a gun? Can you make the throw 100 times out of 100? If it can't be 100 it had better be 99.
Again, there’s magic in repetition. ✍️Q: What actions are you willing to repeat every day to advance your art, your work, your life?
4. God is in the details
On raising the act of dishwashing to an art, this exchange between Chef Spirodocus and the university president's daughter, Pella Affenlight:
Chef Spirodocus waved his stubby fingers. He sat down his clipboard and looked at her with a solemn expression. 'You're a fine employee,' he said, his voice thick with feeling.
“Thank you,” Pella said.
He waved his fingers again, as if to brush away the casualness of her response. “Listen to me. You care about the kitchen. You dry the spots from the glasses. You think nobody notices.” He tapped himself on the temple near the eye. “But I notice. A fine employee.”
Pella felt her own eyes getting moist. Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought. Or maybe it's just me, a purportedly intelligent person, purportedly aware of the ways in which women and wage laborers have been oppressed by millennia, and I get choked up because someone tells me I'm good at washing dishes.
“Thank you,” she said again, this time with earnest emotion that easily matched Chef Spirodocus's own.
He dropped an elbow onto the table, squished his supple chin against his stubby fingered hand, eyed her with a melancholy squint. “The God is in the detail. As they say. You understand this, I think. You would make a really good chef.”
I've heard that the devil is in the details. Which I thought meant to pay attention to the small print on a legal contract. I've never heard “the God is in the detail,” a challenge to pay better attention. Which raises the act of dishwashing to an art. ✍️Q: Where do you want to sharpen your attention to detail? Where do you notice details that others do not?
3. To play is human (h/t to Schiller)
Here’s team captain Mike Schwartz taking the lead:
Coach Cox wasn't much for pre-game speeches. “Here's the lineup, men. . . No reason we can't handle these guys. Schwartz, you got anything to add?”
Schwartz reached down and plucked an index card out of his shin guard knee flap. “Schiller,” he said. “Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.”
Schwartz paused and passed his eyes around the huddle, slowly, allowing them to settle on each of his teammates' faces, intense but benevolent. Whatever remained of the Harpooners' nervousness burned away like gas when the pilot’s lit.
“We've done the work. We've ran and lifted and puked our guts out. We built this program out of nothing. We made ourselves proud to put on this uniform. We don't have a single goddamn thing left to prove to anyone. We're proven. Today we play.”
He extended a hand into the center of the huddle. He looked at Henry and smiled. “Play on three. One, two, three, PLAY!'"
✍️Q: What are you taking seriously that could be infused with more of a spirit of play? What kind of play might you take more seriously?
2. Beware, literature can make you an asshole
From the mind of Guert Affenlight, the president of the college:
Affenlight found this hypothesis exciting, if dubiously constructed, then he glanced at Aparicio, hands folded mournfully in his lap, and his excitement curdled to embarrassment. Literature could turn you into an asshole. He'd learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.
We’re reminded of the I-Thou relationship from Martin Buber. When we see people as specimens for our own intellectual investigation, we cease to see them for themselves. Prejudice works this way, too.
1. A soul isn’t something you’re born with
Maybe my favorite philosophical passage in the book:
A soul isn't something a person is born with. It’s something that must be built by effort and error, study and love, and you did that with more dedication than most.
We build our souls not for our own benefit, but for the benefit of those who know (and knew) us. In the making of a valuable life, there’s a dedication to soul-making —building through “effort and error, study and love.” ✍️Q: Where is your effort and error? Where are you fielding? What are you learning? Where are you loving?
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Ready for Spring?
If these reflections resonate with you, consider joining a baseball team. Or a wisdom workshop. The eighteenth "Writing the Good Life" cycle begins April 2nd. You'll build out your soul through writing practice, community dialogue, and philosophical inquiry. Limited to just 9 participants, this seven-week journey provides a space to examine your own "art of fielding" life's challenges and opportunities with greater presence and wisdom.
With gratitude for your presence in our community,
Sean
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