Brothers K

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Conference on
Baseball in Literature and Culture
July 16, 2021
[orig. April 3, 2020]
On the campus of Ottawa University,
Ottawa, Kansas

“No justice in this
world”:
David James Duncan’s
The Brothers K
jposopher.blogspot.com
Up@dawn
jposopher.blogspot.com
@Osopher
https://twitter.com/

“What I told him… is that
there is no justice in this
world.”

Before we begin: it’s the
summer of Ted Simmons's
induction to the Hall of Fame.
I grew up on those mostly-
mediocre ‘70s Cardinal
teams, justice demands of
me a quick salute to Simba.
Did you know that his son
John was actor Jon (Mad
Men, Million Dollar Arm)
Hamm’s best friend?

Duncan had been working
on his second novel for
two years when he
happened to reread "The
Brothers Karamazov." "I
found there were a lot of
parallels. There's an
inquisition scene of sorts,
an exile, a murder scene, a
public scandal." He
decided to call his own
novel "The Brothers K,"
and use it "to poke fun at
the similarities." nyt

THE 19th-century Russian novel
has been born again in "The
Brothers K," David James Duncan's
wildly excessive, flamboyantly
sentimental, tear-jerking, thigh-
slapping homage to Dostoyevsky
and Tolstoy -- and the game of
baseball.
For the title isn't merely a spin on
"The Brothers Karamazov," though
Mr. Duncan makes frequent
references to that heavy tome.

"K," we are reminded, is also the
baseball-scorecard symbol for
striking out -- and thus, as Mr.
Duncan extrapolates it, for
failing, flunking, pratfalling,
making a bad situation even
worse. But it can have a positive
side as well… NYT, June 28, 1992

70% failure = success
But the main thing I was thinking," he
added, explaining the book's title, "is the
baseball statistician's lingo. A 'K' is a
strikeout, which is a personal failure. I love
the fact that a man who is considered a
success in baseball has a 30 percent
success rate -- in other words, a 70 percent
failure rate."
Pinch-Hitting for
Dostoyevsky
nyt

I love that too, about the game of baseball and the game of life. Human
success is almost never total, never remotely so -- especially not for
those who give it a "squalid cash interpretation" and reduce it to a
"bitch-goddess." Our triumphs should always leave us modestly humble,
but still confident and cognizant that "our errors are not such awfully
solemn things."
But hey Vandy Boys, let's try to have fewer of them tonight in Omaha!

Like Hugh Chance in the
novel, Mr. Duncan's
father was a pitcher. "He
was an outstanding city-
league softball pitcher. He
batted about .500 every
year." Like Peter, one of
Hugh Chance's sons, Mr.
Duncan studied Eastern
religions.

“Want the very pitch you’re gonna get” sounds Eastern.
And Stoic.
"Don't seek for everything to happen as you wish it would, but rather wish that everything
happens as it actually will - then you'll have a calm and happy life." - Epictetus TW @EthicsinBricks

Also like the Chance
children, Mr. Duncan was
raised in the Seventh-day
Adventist faith. "I knew I
was going to take on the
fundamentalist
upbringing. It feels
natural to me to waffle
between extreme
reverence and extreme
irreverence -- and nothing
makes me feel less
reverent than a church."
-- S. Hunnewell, nyt
28. The New Earth
On the new earth, in which righteousness dwells,
God will provide an eternal home for the
redeemed and a perfect environment for
everlasting life, love, joy, and learning in His
presence. For here God Himself will dwell with
His people, and suffering and death will
have passed away.
https://www.adventist.org/beliefs/

The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom
drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of
triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and
sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three
sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational
Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha…
“Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself
and listens to his own lie comes to a point that he cannot
distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so
loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no
respect he ceases to love.”
“What is hell? I maintain that it is the suffering of being
unable to love.”
“I love mankind, he said, "but I find to my amazement that
the more I love mankind as a whole, the less I love man in
particular.”
“The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying
alive, but in finding something to live for.”
“This is my last message to you: in sorrow, seek
happiness.”

"The Brothers K" Is
The Great American
Novel You Haven't
Read Yet
Love, war, and baseball...
“the "Great American
Novel"... Buzzfeed
==
The story begins in
February 1957...

The Brothers K [“a garden of delights
for baseball lovers”- Kirkus] “is about
the Chance family of Camas,
Washington.
The patriarch of the family is the
memorable "Papa Toe" Chance, a
former minor league baseball pitcher. He
and his deeply religious wife have six
children: four boys and two young twin
girls. The boys take turns as
protagonists of a story primarily narrated
by the youngest, Kincaid, who relates
the exploits of his older brothers..
The eldest is Everett, who
passionately protests the Vietnam
War and writes beautiful love letters.
Peter is a naturally gifted athlete who
prefers academics and spiritual
enlightenment. And the guileless
Irwin… is deeply loyal and religious
when he's sent to fight in the war.

The plot traces the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the
Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam. One son becomes an
atheist and draft resister; another immerses himself in Eastern religions,
while the third, the most genuinely Christian of the children, ends up in
Southeast Asia. In spite of the author's obvious affection for the sport, this is
not a baseball novel; it is, as Kincaid says, ``the story of an eight-way tangle
of human beings, only one-eighth of which was a pro ballpayer.'' The book
portrays the extraordinary differences that can exist among siblings--much
like the Dostoyevski novel to which The Brothers K alludes in more than just
title--and how family members can redeem one another in the face of
adversity.” PW

The conflict in the book is largely derived from
the different characters' varied experiences
with religion, science, and spirituality. The
family's matriarch is intensely devoted to her
church, and she has her reasons, secrets she
keeps closely guarded. One of her sons sits at
her side at church, another becomes an atheist,
another a devout buddhist. Meanwhile, the kid
sisters play "Famous Scientists," performing
memorable experiments such as "centrifuging
flickers." The characters are all seeking
meaning, but how they arrive there is a tangly
maze of different paths.

"James’s rejection of a plan (and a Planner) is
like Ivan Karamazov’s. James declares it
impossible to accept “a world in which…
millions were kept permanently happy on the
one simple condition that a certain lost soul on
the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torture.”"
"William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism" by Robert D.
Richardson https://a.co/bvWELwM

“No fact in human nature is more
characteristic than its willingness
to live on a chance. The
existence of the chance makes
the difference… between a life
of which the keynote is
resignation and a life of which
the keynote is hope.”― William
James, The Varieties of
Religious Experience

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a
profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our
place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage
of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and
subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of
elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are
our emotions in the presence of great art or music or
literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as
those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr.
The notion that science and spirituality are somehow
mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a
Candle in the Dark

“Not God, but more life,” said James, is the
most natural human impulse and the
ultimate source of religious variety. And, as
he informed a correspondent in 1901, his
own sense of life was most quickened by
what he could not help regarding as the
progressive epic of evolution. “I believe
myself to be ( probably ) permanently
incapable of believing the Christian scheme
of vicarious salvation, and wedded to a
more continuously evolutionary mode of
thought."

“...a little cooling down of animal
excitability and instinct, a little
loss of animal toughness, a little
irritable weakness and descent of
the pain-threshold, will bring the
worm at the core of all our usual
springs of delight into full view,
and turn us into melancholy
metaphysicians…
Of course the music can
commence again;—and again
and again,—at intervals.” VRE

Thursday, July 8, 2021
Brothers
David James Duncan's early-'90s novel The Brothers K --
about the brothers Chance, who seem (in the spirit of William
James's remark*) always willing to live on a chance -- is a
sprawling epic tale centered on the foibles and exploits of a
family like none I've ever encountered, and in that way more
than any other resembles Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers
Karamazov. Both families encounter more than their share of
heartache and disappointment. Both pose deep probing
questions about suffering and unredeemable injustice in our
world and the true meaning and value of freedom. Both
challenge easy optimism and thoughtless theodicy.

But Dostoevsky's family features no pitching paterfamilias
on the comeback trail, no hyper-pious Seventh Day
Adventist Mom or Darwin-loving atheist grand-mum,
“I asked Papa what the
big deal about Charles
Darwin was… he said
he preferred Charles
Dillon” [Stengel]...

no immersion in American '60s counterculture, no laugh-out-loud acerbic
wit (at least not to my sensibility)...

And no stirring reflections on the
philosophical dimensions of fly-fishing
(the subject of his first novel) and what
that has in common with baseball.
“Fishing is like watching baseball,
he says, in that it takes such total
concentration that you shouldn’t
even be noticing little details like
your arms and legs and head and
mind and the miles-long strings of
questions inside it… Practice
fishing now--by concentrating on
this ballgame.”

Also missing from Duncan's tome,
despite its philosophical edge and
penchant for oracular
speechifying, is the sort of
ponderous metaphysical
ruminating I associate with 19th
century Russian lit...and with Love
and Death.
To love is to suffer. To
avoid suffering one must
not love. But then one
suffers from not loving.
Therefore, to love is to
suffer; not to love is to
suffer; to suffer is to suffer.
To be happy is to love. To
be happy, then, is to
suffer, but suffering makes
one unhappy. Therefore,
to be unhappy, one must
love or love to suffer or
suffer from too much
happiness.

There's enough material
in Bros K to furnish
several presentations, I
think. So I'm going to try
and avoid spoilers this
year, and just make the
central point that
Duncan’s larger message
counters dour and dark
Russian lit-style
resignation and fatalism
with aspiration, effort, and
good old can-do
pragmatic meliorism.
Don’t just sit there in despair, Duncan’s story says in the spirit of a
James or a Sagan, do something. Make something happen. Have some
instructive varieties of experience. And so they do, these varied
Chances.

Another central theme I’d like to note, in
light of my recent annual 4th of July
revisitation with Richard Ford's
Independence Day, is the perennial
frustration and ultimate impotence of
parenting (which we should distinguish
from the hope implicit in "natality,"
which Hannah Arendt saw as
civilization’s perpetual promise of
renewal). The Chance parent-child
dynamic embodies this entire gamut. We
can try to shine a light, but can’t make
them bask in it. Kids must finally learn
their own hard life lessons and discover
their own role-modeling father/mother
figures to turn to for guidance and
instruction.

It was unwise, in Bros K, for Mom and son
Irwin to turn to the Adventist minister. He's
the Bland Inquisitor, counterpart to
Dostoevsky's Grand, whose betrayal sends
Irwin off to Vietnam at the worst possible
time despite his Adventist conscientious
objection. (Was there ever a good time for an
American to be sent to Vietnam under the
auspices of American domino-blocking?)
And he offers one prominent illustration of
my presentation title "No Justice in This
World"... A truly just world would not
require non-violent pacifists to kill their
counterparts, nor would that tragic outcome
be engineered by precisely those pietists
whose tutelage instructed those pacifists.
“Thou shalt not kill.
With all my heart I
believed this. And I
killed. So what am I
now? And why
should I live?
...I’m dead. The hell
with me.”

Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, and one line in particular --
All chance, direction, which thou canst not see -- would
offer solace if you could believe it. Pope was a
Leibnizian/Panglossian hyper-optimist, as the concluding
lines pronounce:
All discord, harmony, not understood;
All partial evil, universal good:
And, spite of pride, in erring reason's spite,
One truth is clear, Whatever is, is right.
The brothers Chance (and their Papa) learn, the hard way,
that Pope (A. or the) was dead wrong. But still they bear
their freedom with dignity and perseverance. They're
meliorists. Or maybe we should just say they're pluggers,
just doing what they can.

“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone
quickly to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom
with which the ill-fated creature is born.”
“Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy
name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death.
But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall
allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity.”
“But man seeks to bow before that only which is recognized by
the greater majority, if not by all his fellow-men, as having a
right to be worshipped; whose rights are so unquestionable that
men agree unanimously to bow down to it. For the chief concern
of these miserable creatures is not to find and worship the idol
of their own choice, but to discover that which all others will
believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.”
“There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who
has freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall
soonest find a new object or idea to worship.”

Friday, July 9, 2021
Misunderstanding the Inquisitor
Weirdest trivial thing I've learned about Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor: Laura Bush
and Hillary Clinton both like it, for oppositely-misconceived reasons. From The
New Yorker, October 2009:
In 2001, The New York Times reported that Laura Bush’s favorite piece of
literature was the “Grand Inquisitor” scene from Dostoevsky’s novel. She
saw it as an affirmation of faith:
In the dialogue with the Inquisitor, Jesus remains silent, and the chapter
has two endings, the first tragic, the second a victory for Christianity.
For Mrs. Bush, there was no ambiguity. ”It’s about life, and it’s about
death, and it’s about Christ,” she has said. ”I find it really reassuring.”

Then, Hillary Clinton revealed this week her
fave is also “The Brothers Karamazov.” She
had exactly the opposite take—for her, the
chapter was a testament to the virtue of
doubt, not certainty:
Asked to name the book that had made the
biggest impact on her, she singled out “The
Brothers Karamazov.” The parable of the
Grand Inquisitor in Dostoyevsky’s novel, she
said, speaks to the dangers of certitude.
“For a lot of reasons, that was an important
part of my thinking,” Mrs. Clinton said. “One
of the greatest threats we face is from people
who believe they are absolutely, certainly
right about everything.”

I'm pretty sure Dostoevsky was not intending to issue just another standard
liberal protest against dogmatic certitude, any more than he meant to
reinforce his readers' conventional pieties of faith.
What exactly he was saying is still a bit murky to me, but the dubiety of
"Miracle, Mystery, and Authority"* has to be at the heart of it. That, and the
credulity of so many humans who don't have it in them to heed Immanuel
Kant's plea for enlightenment.**
Do you wonder what Melania thinks of the Inquisitor? Me neither.
*We corrected and improved Thy teaching and based it
upon "Miracle, Mystery, and Authority." And men
rejoiced at finding themselves led once more like a herd of
cattle, and at finding their hearts at last delivered of the
terrible burden laid upon them by Thee, which caused
them so much suffering.

Immanuel KANT (1724-1804)
“Two things fill the mind with
ever new and increasing
admiration and awe, the more
often and steadily we reflect
upon them: the starry heavens
above me and the moral law
within me. I do not seek or
conjecture either of them as if
they were veiled obscurities or
extravagances beyond the
horizon of my vision; I see them
before me and connect them
immediately with the
consciousness of my existence.”

**Enlightenment is man's
release from his self-incurred
immaturity. Immaturity is
man's inability to make use of
his understanding without
direction from another. This
immaturity is self-imposed
when its cause lies not in lack of
reason but in lack of resolution
and courage to use it without
direction from another. Sapere
aude! "Have courage to use
your own reason!" -- that is the
motto of enlightenment.
“Rules for happiness:
something to do, someone to
love, something to hope for.”

Growing up in the Kantian
sense means “finding the
courage to live in a world
of painful uncertainty
without giving in to
dogma or despair,” and
embracing freedom as
our opportunity to try
and inch the world a bit
closer to what it should be
while never losing sight
of what it is. g’r

"I’d trapped myself in a script… But
to be scripted at all is to be
prepackaged, programmed, pinned
to a page. Only the unwritten can
truly live a life. So who I was, what I
was, had to be unwritten." Brothers
K
I'm most drawn to her late discussion in Why Grow Up? of *Shakespeare and the
respective ages and stages of human life. All the world's a stage for sure, but like
Neiman (and Kant, and James, and Sagan) I prefer to think of us players as improv
artists rather than scripted drones. Resistance to an age of immaturity and imbecility
is not futile. Thinking and acting courageously on the basis of our own reasoned
understanding is the thing. The play's conclusion is not yet writ. U@d

Nobody expects the Inquisition
My reflexive free-association, whenever I think of Inquisition (grand or otherwise), is

Too soon?
Monty Python could make fun of the Spanish
Inquisition, according to Adam Gopnik, "because
Enlightenment ideals of tolerance and decency
[and reason etc.] make us feel safe from it."
But he said that a decade ago, midway through
the civilized administration of our most literate
president since TR (POTUS #44 just released his
summer reading list, btw). Do we still feel so
safe? Nobody I know expected POTUS #45,
though if we'd been paying attention to the
interrogations and insinuations perpetrated under
POTUS #43 we probably should have.

Gopnik's reassurance came in the context of a
review of God’s Jury: The Inquisition and the
Making of the Modern World by Cullen
Murphy.
After reading Murphy’s accounts of
so many bodies tortured and so many
lives ended, one ought, I suppose, to
feel guilty about laughing at the old
Python sketch, but it’s hard not to feel
a little giddy watching it. How did we
become this free to laugh at
fanaticism?

That for a moment or two
the humanists seem to
have it—that we don’t
really expect the
Inquisition to barge into
our living rooms—is a
fragile triumph of a
painful, difficult, ongoing
education in
Enlightenment values.
Bloody miracle, really.

Miracle. Plus, again, Mystery
and Authority (and fear,
surprise, ruthless efficiency, "an
almost fanatical devotion to the
Pope" etc.), the chief weapons of
the sort of intimidation and cruelty
that we delude ourselves in
thinking so remote as to be the
mere stuff of parody. We live in a
time when vicious, self-righteous
dogmatists lack all humility and
circumspection, while the humble
and circumspect lack all
conviction. “Triangle of cult indoctrination”

We had no choice is what the
Grand Inquisitor announces in
Dostoyevsky. We know the
cruellest of fanatics by their
exceptionally clear consciences.
Gopnik
If you believe that you know the
truth of the cosmos or of history,
then the crime of causing pain to
one person does seem trivial
compared with the risk of
permitting the death or
damnation of thousands.

The fundamentalists, by
'knowing' the answers
before they start, and then
forcing nature into the
straitjacket of their
discredited preconceptions,
lie outside the domain of
science - or of any honest
intellectual inquiry.
--Stephen Jay Gould

So to revisit and slightly correct the
earlier First Ladies slide, Hillary was
right about history even if a bit off-
base as a literary critic and diviner of
Dostoevsky's intentions. Almost
nobody nowadays expects another
Inquisition.
They'll be the heirs of Sarah, and they’ll
be marching not in the spirit of ‘76 but of
Jan 6.
But we shouldn't be surprised
at a preposterously-founded
fake-conspiracy-driven
Insurrection. Our interrogators,
if they come, won't be nearly so
amusing as Michael Palin.

Or maybe, just maybe, the fragile values of enlightenment will
slightly overmatch the forces of ignorance and darkness.
Maybe we’ll be lucky. Maybe we’ll realize the truth of section
IX of Bros K (p.638): “Our greatest fears, like our greatest
hopes, often come to nothing.”
Maybe we’ll embrace our freedom, accept our finitude and
fallibility, and not be resigned to failure and unhappiness in
this life.
Maybe, as young Kade implored his despairing Papa, we’ll
“fight to stay alive inside! No matter what.”

Saturday, June 26, 2021
No place for old men
Like the children in his novel The Brothers K, David James Duncan "was raised in the
Seventh-day Adventist faith. 'I knew I was going to take on the fundamentalist
upbringing. It feels natural to me to waffle between extreme reverence and extreme
irreverence -- and nothing makes me feel less reverent than a church.'" nyt
But what of the Church of Baseball?
Like the late commissioner and Renaissance scholar A. Bartlett Giamatti, nothing
makes me feel more reverent than a green field of the mind.

The Adventist heaven is described in literal, naturalistic terms as a
"new earth, in which righteousness dwells, God will provide an eternal
home for the redeemed and a perfect environment for everlasting life,
love, joy, and learning in His presence. For here God Himself will dwell
with His people, and suffering and death will have passed away."
That does sound like a dreamy place. A Good Place. A fictional place.
Like Ray Kinsella's Iowa. A utopia, a no-place where everyone's young
and ready to play two like Mr. Cub.
(Looks like the Vandy Boys will play only two against the covid-riddled
Wolfpack, btw, today's scheduled re-rematch has been declared No
Contest.)

The moral, unintended by the Adventists but implied by their vision of a tangible
afterlife: revere what's here and now, live your dreams when you can. As the
Epicureans held, while we are here, death is not. While we are vital and active, and
if we are lucky, suffering and senescence are not. Or at least they're not all-
consuming. Life should be a garden party, not a solemn march to perdition.
Professor Giamatti understood the power of utopian dreams, landing on the tender
side of William James's tough-and-tender distinction.
"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."

For this year's conference I proposed originally to
reflect on justice, rules, rationality, self-interest
and "the interests of the game," and philosopher
John Rawls's passion for justice in an unjust
world, all as reflected in The Brothers K by David
James Duncan, who writes:

“Anyone too undisciplined, too self-righteous or
too self-centered to live in the world as it is has
a tendency to idealize a world which ought to
be. But no matter what political or religious
direction such idealists choose, their visions
always share one telling characteristic: in their
utopias, heavens or brave new worlds, their
greatest personal weakness suddenly appears
to be a strength.”

In a truly Rawlsian world, though, particular personal
traits would find no special favor. Rawls’s “veil of
ignorance” would stop us from transmogrifying our
individual weaknesses into social advantages.
And: minding the gap between ought and is does not
necessarily make you undisciplined, self-righteous, or
self-centered. In Immanuel Kant’s philosophy of
enlightenment, it makes you mature -- a grown-up,
possessed of the courage to think for yourself.

Anyway, I was going to ask in some detail what might be the benefit of a "veil of
ignorance" of the sort Rawls introduced in his Theory of Justice, in adjudicating
contentious issues between players, owners, fans, non-fans et al? Would it help
us think more clearly about, for example, the present state of the game with
respect to financial compensation, free agency, etc.? Or about proposed rules
changes designed to alter the pace of he game? Or about the income gap
between players and spectators, and whether his Difference Principle would
rationalize and vindicate it as somehow better for the "least well-off" fans in the
stands? Or about foreign substances on the ball… Would the veil unjustly deny
visionaries knowledge of their weaknesses and strengths, their allegiances and
biases, and other personal biographical information?
But on further reflection, I recall that Rawls has been done here just a couple
conferences back. I don’t think Duncan has been. So I’ll keep Rawls in the
bullpen for now, and move his slides to the bottom of the order.

David James Duncan (b. 1952) is
an American novelist and
essayist, best known for his two
bestselling novels, The River
Why (1983) and The Brothers K
(1992). Both involve fly fishing,
baseball, and family.
He lives with his family in
western Montana, where he is
working on a novel that
combines his loves for Asian
wisdom traditions and the land
and people of the American
West.

Duncan took almost 10 years to follow
up the publication of his much-
praised first novel, The River Why...
2011

...a complex tapestry of family
tensions, baseball, politics and
religion, by turns hilariously
funny and agonizingly sad...
Both received the Pacific
Northwest Booksellers award;
The Brothers K was a New York
Times Notable Book in 1992 and
won a Best Books Award from
the American Library
Association.

“There are many things worth telling
that are not quite narrative. And
eternity itself possesses no beginning,
middle or end. Fossils, arrowheads,
castle ruins, empty crosses: from the
Parthenon to the Bo Tree to a grown
man's or woman's old stuffed bear,
what moves us about many objects is
not what remains but what has
vanished. There comes a time, thanks
to rivers, when a few beautiful old
teeth are all that remain of the two-
hundred-foot spires of life we call
trees. There comes a river, whose
current is time, that does a similar
sculpting in the mind.”

I mostly fish rivers these days. In
so doing, movement becomes
stasis, flux is the constant, and
everything flows around, through,
and beyond me, escaping
ungrasped, unnamed, and
unscathed. The river's clean escape
does not prevent belief in its
reality. On the contrary, there is
nothing I love more than the feel of
a wholeness sliding toward,
around, and past me while I stand
like an idiot savant in its midst,
focusing on tiny, idiot-savantic
bits of what is so beautiful to me,
and so close, yet so wondrously
ungraspable.”

Highly inventive formally, the novel is mainly narrated by
Kincaid Chance, the youngest son in a family of four boys and
identical twin girls, the children of Hugh Chance, a discouraged
minor-league ballplayer whose once-promising career was
curtained by an industrial accident, and his wife Laura, an
increasingly fanatical Seventh-Day Adventist. The plot traces
the working-out of the family's fate from the beginning of the
Eisenhower years through the traumas of Vietnam. g’r

Friday, June 25, 2021
"Success"
The speed of my recovery so far is apparently above-average, although I
did have to pop a power-pill this morning at 4.
I'm reminded that there will be good days and not-so-good, on the way
back to full ambulatory freedom. And apparently it'll be longer still 'til I
can resume pedaling. Articles like this one in the Times ("Not All Cyclists
Wear Lycra") make me itch, literally, to get my Raleigh back on the open
road. Patience has never been my prime virtue. One more thing to work
on.

The impending July Baseball in Literature and Culture
conference is my biggest external motivator right now.
I've been given tentative permission to fly to Ottawa (KS)
for that, if my convalescence continues apace. I'm eager to
go and talk about Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov and
(David James) Duncan's Brothers K, about pain and
suffering and deliverance therefrom.
And to that end, I've hunted up the Times's original
review from twenty-nine years ago...

● Stephen Dunn's poetical view of prayer as talking to a more moral
version of oneself? Or of Emerson's view, in Self-Reliance?*
* Prayer looks abroad and asks for some foreign addition to come through
some foreign virtue, and loses itself in endless mazes of natural and
supernatural, and mediatorial and miraculous. Prayer that craves a
particular commodity,--any thing less than all good,--is vicious. Prayer is
the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is
the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God
pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private
end is meanness and theft. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature
and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not
beg. He will then see prayer in all action. The prayer of the farmer
kneeling in his field to weed it, the prayer of the rower kneeling with the
stroke of his oar, are true prayers heard throughout nature, though for

THE GRAND INQUISITOR
By
Feodor Dostoevsky
An extract from M. Dostoevsky's celebrated novel, The Brothers Karamazof
The idea is that Christ revisits earth, coming to Spain at the period of the Inquisition,
and is at once arrested as a heretic by the Grand Inquisitor. One of the three brothers of
the story, Ivan, a rank materialist and an atheist of the new school, is supposed to
throw this conception into the form of a poem, which he describes to Alyosha—the
youngest of the brothers, a young Christian mystic brought up by a "saint" in a
monastery… Gutenberg

“Man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly
to whom he can hand over that great gift of freedom with which the ill-
fated creature is born.”
“In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us
your slaves, but feed us.”
“Without a clear perception of his reasons for living, man will never
consent to live, and will rather destroy himself than tarry on earth,
though he be surrounded with bread".”
“Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and
beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the
secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of
heaven and eternity.”

“There exists no greater or more painful anxiety for a man who has
freed himself from all religious bias, than how he shall soonest find a
new object or idea to worship.”
For the chief concern of these miserable creatures is not to find and
worship the idol of their own choice, but to discover that which all
others will believe in, and consent to bow down to in a mass.”
“There are three Powers, three unique Forces upon earth, capable of
conquering for ever by charming the conscience of these weak rebels-
-men--for their own good; and these Forces are: Miracle, Mystery
and Authority.” g’r

Dostoevsky on the meaning of life
“I mean to work tremendously hard,” the young Fyodor
Dostoyevsky (November 11, 1821–February 9, 1881) resolved in
contemplating his literary future, beseeching his impoverished
mother to buy him books. At the age of twenty-seven, he was
arrested for belonging to a literary society that circulated books
deemed dangerous by the tsarist regime. He was sentenced to
death. On December 22, 1849, he was taken to a public square in
Saint Petersburg, alongside a handful of other inmates, where they
were to be executed as a warning to the masses. They were read
their death sentence, put into their execution attire of white shirts,
and allowed to kiss the cross. Ritualistic sabers were broken over
their heads. Three at a time, they were stood against the stakes
where the execution was to be carried out. Dostoyevsky, the sixth
in line, grew acutely aware that he had only moments to live…
(B’pickings, continues)

James on the meaning of life
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing,— the
marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with
some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man 2 s or
woman 's pains.—And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will
always be the chance for that marriage to take place.
What Makes a Life Significant

“I'd trapped myself in a
script.... But to be scripted at
all is to be prepackaged,
programmed, pinned to a
page. Only the unwritten can
truly live a life. So who I was,
what I was, had to be
unwritten.”

Another quintessentially American saga from Oregon writer Duncan, moving from the
metaphysics of fishing in his first novel (The River Why, 1983) to an exploration here of bush-
league baseball and the perils of Seventh-Day Adventism during the Vietnam era. The
remarkable Chance family consists of six precocious children orbiting at various altitudes and
velocities around their equally distinctive parents. Papa Hugh is a sublimely talented pitcher
whose career is cut short by an accident in which his thumb is crushed, while Mama Laura
zealously wields Adventist tenets to guard herself and her brood against devils and doubts. Four
brothers and twin sisters grow up in this pressure-cooker of frustration and blind faith, which
becomes more intense as the boys go their separate ways and encounter maternal resistance.
Hugh has an operation in which part of his big toe is grafted onto his thumb, prompting the
return of his self-respect and a stirring comeback in the minors, but the family situation
continues to decay when Vietnam turns one son into a draft-dodger on the lam in Canada and
claims another—the gentlest and most religious of the lot—as a foot soldier, until conflict
between the boy's faith and daily reality brings him to assault an officer who ordered the
execution of a child prisoner. After he's been shut away in an Army hospital and battered by
electroshock treatment, his family reunites to free him, bringing him home just as Hugh begins a
rapid, losing battle with cancer. Unfortunately losing focus as it tracks family members around
the world to Vietnam and British Columbia as well as rural India, this epic story is still
marvelously detailed and poignant, and a garden of delights for baseball lovers. Kirkus

“Peter didn’t want to change the world:
he wanted to fully comprehend it.”
“More details explain things more, but
less details confuse things less”
“I started having doubts right on top
of my certainty.”
“Thus did my siblings and I learn one of
the hard lessons of life: the best way to
strip the allure and dreaminess from a
lifelong dream is, very often, simply to
have it come true.” “The philosophers have only
interpreted the world, in various
ways. The point, however, is to
change it.

“To live an ethical life, is it essential
that we minimize our carbon
footprint by, for example, installing
solar panels… avoiding meat, and
whenever possible riding a bike or
taking public transport rather than
driving a car? ...these are good
things to do, but… Our overriding
obligation, as individuals, is to be
activist citizens and to do our best to
persuade our government to come
together with other governments
and find a global solution to a global
problem.” One World Now: The
Ethics of Globalization

“To see how much our thinking about ethics needs to change, consider the work
that, better than any other, represents late twentieth-century thinking on justice in
the liberal American establishment: John Rawls's A Theory of Justice….
If we were to apply this method globally rather than for a given society it would
immediately be obvious that one fact about which those making the choice should
be ignorant is whether they are citizens of a rich country…
The issue of how the rich countries and their citizens are to respond to the needs
of the hundreds of millions of people in extreme poverty has an urgency that
overrides the longer-term goal of changing the culture of societies that are not
effectively regulated by a public conception of justice...”
One World Now

Two years ago at
this conference we
heard about Rawls’s
reasons for calling
baseball "the best of
all games." No need
to rehash that, we
can skip to slide
#12.

* "Baseball is the best of all games," Rawls told a friend.
First: the rules of the game are in equilibrium: that is, from the start, the
diamond was made just the right size, the pitcher’s mound just the right
distance from home plate, etc., and this makes possible the marvelous plays,
such as the double play. The physical layout of the game is perfectly adjusted
to the human skills it is meant to display and to call into graceful exercise.
Whereas, basketball, e.g., is constantly (or was then) adjusting its rules to get
them in balance.
Second: the game does not give unusual preference or advantage to special
physical types, e.g., to tall men as in basketball. All sorts of abilities can find a
place somewhere, the tall and the short etc. can enjoy the game together in
different positions.

Third: the game uses all
parts of the body: the arms
to throw, the legs to run,
and to swing the bat, etc.;
per contra soccer where
you can’t touch the ball. It
calls upon speed, accuracy
of throw, gifts of sight for
batting, shrewdness for
pitchers and catchers, etc.
And there are all kinds of
strategies.

Fourth: all plays of the game are open to view: the
spectators and the players can see what is going on.
Per contra football where it is hard to know what is
happening in the battlefront along the line. Even the
umpires can’t see it all, so there is lots of cheating etc.
And in basketball, it is hard to know when to call a foul.
There are close calls in baseball too, but the umps do
very well on the whole, and these close calls arise from
the marvelous timing built into the game and not from
trying to police cheaters etc.

Fifth: baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with the
ball, and this has the remarkable effect of concentrating the
excitement of plays at different points of the field at the same time.
Will the runner cross the plate before the fielder gets to the ball and
throws it to home plate, and so on.
Finally, there is the factor of time, the use of which is a central part
of any game. Baseball shares with tennis the idea that time never
runs out, as it does in basketball and football and soccer. This
means that there is always time for the losing side to make a
comeback. The last of the ninth inning becomes one of the most
potentially exciting parts of the game. And while the same
sometimes happens in tennis also, it seems to happen less often.
Cricket, much like baseball (and indeed I must correct my remark
above that baseball is the only game where scoring is not done with
the ball), does not have a time limit. Boston Review

John Bordley Rawls was born and schooled in
Baltimore, Maryland, USA. Although his family was
of comfortable means, his youth was twice marked
by tragedy. In two successive years, his two younger
brothers contracted an infectious disease from
him—diphtheria in one case and pneumonia in the
other—and died. Rawls’s vivid sense of the
arbitrariness of fortune may have stemmed in part
from this early experience. His remaining, older
brother attended Princeton for undergraduate
studies and was a great athlete. Rawls followed his
brother to Princeton. Although Rawls played
baseball, he was, in later life at least, excessively
modest about his success at that or at any other
endeavor. IEP
What would he have said
about this?

As a college student Rawls wrote an
intensely religious senior thesis (BI)
and had considered studying for the
priesthood. Yet Rawls lost his
Christian faith as an infantryman in
World War II on seeing the
capriciousness of death in combat
and learning of the horrors of the
Holocaust. Then in the 1960s Rawls
spoke out against America's
military actions in Vietnam. SEP
What he missed-Purdy tnr… 3qd

“How could I pray and ask God to help
me, or my family, or my country, or any
other cherished thing I cared about,
when God would not save millions of
Jews
from Hitler? ...To interpret history as
expressing God’s will, God’s will must
accord with the most basic ideas of
justice as we know them… The following
months and years led to an increasing
rejection of many of the main doctrines
of Christianity...”

“In the spring term of 1969, he taught a
course “Problems of War.. Rawls was
deeply concerned to understand what
flaws in his society might account for its
prosecuting a plainly unjust war with
such ferocity, and what citizens might
do to oppose this war… The last
quarter of the course was canceled
because of a general strike of the
Harvard student body.”

...he located the flaws
mainly in the ways that
wealth is… easily
converted into political
influence.”
John Rawls: His Life and
Theoryof Justice

Brothers K

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