On a recent expedition (with Paulette, taking our daughter Gray to summer music camp) I had a chance to spend a few quiet days in a cabin on the shore of Lake Winnipesauke, New Hampshire. It was a blissful escape from newspapers, television, radio, magazines, and the 'net. In my baggage was a copy of sports columnist Thomas Boswell's book How Life Imitates the World Series (1982) — a collection of baseball essays written in delightful prose which at times arcs high out of the park. A few brief samples:

• "Perhaps more than any of our other major sports, baseball rewards the mundane and the extraordinary in almost equal measures." (Why Baltimore Wins More Games Than Anybody Else)
• "A sport can be extremely difficult without being extremely important." (Koufax: Passing the Art Along)
• "... a man is defined by how he spends his time, not how he spends his money." (The Best Manager There Is)
• "Extraordinary men often bring a fresh simplicity to the complexity of their chosen fields, carrying a sense of order and elemental sanity with them." (Hustling to Tie Cobb)

Lovely thoughts, relevant far beyond the ballfield. (see also AwesomelySimple (26 January 2001))

TopicPersonalHistory - TopicLiterature - 2002-06-22

(correlates: SparkyAndSandy, ComplexSimplicity2, InverseAphorisms, ...)