A. Bartlett Giamatti - Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their Games

Exile and Change in Renaissance Literature

The University and the Public Interest

Play of Double Senses: Spensers Faerie Queene

The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic

A Free and Ordered Space: The Real World of the University

A Great and Glorious Game: Baseball Writings of A. Bartlett Giamatti (edited by Kenneth S. Robson)

The distance from the pitchers rubber to the front edge of home plate is fifty-nine feet, one inch. The rubber itself is one inch behind the center of the pitchers mound.

Although see Official Baseball Rules , 8.03 and 8.04, setting time limits of pitchers.

TAKE TIME FOR
PARADISE

Americans and Their Games

A. Bartlett Giamatti

Copyright 1989 by Estate of A. Bartlett Giamatti
Foreword copyright 2011 by Jon Meacham
Afterword copyright 2011 by Marcus Giamatti

Baseball and Writing copyright 1961 by Marianne Moore, renewed 1989 by
Lawrence E. Brinn and Louise Crane, executors of the Estate of Marianne Moore, from
The Complete
Poems of Marianne Mooreby Marianne Moore. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a
division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Portions of the work were previously published in the New York Times.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
whatsoever without written permission from the publisher except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Bloomsbury
USA, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Published by Bloomsbury USA, New York

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Giamatti, A. Bartlett.
Take time for paradise : Americans and their games / A. Bartlett Giamatti; foreword by
Jon Meacham.
p. cm.
Originally published: New York : Summit Books, c1989.
ISBN-13: 978-1-60819-224-3 (hardback)
1. SportsSocial aspectsUnited States. 2. LeisureSocial aspectsUnited States. 3.
BaseballSocial
aspectsUnited States. I. Title.
GV706.5.G53 2011
306.483dc22
2010048207

First published in 1989 by Summit Books, a division of Simon & Schuster
First Bloomsbury USA edition 2011
This e-book edition published in 2011

E-book ISBN: 978-1-60819-441-4

www.bloomsburyusa.com

To Abram and Kathryn Smith

CONTENTS

by Jon Meacham

by Marcus Giamatti

Jon Meacham

As a Southerner, a Christian, and a baseball fan, I have long considered myself a man with a tragic vision of the world. To me there is a single inescapable fact of life on this side of Paradise: that the human enterprise to arrange things as we wish is ultimately futile. In hours of illness and danger, of decision and anxiety, we cry to the gods. Desperate and hungry and fearful, we plead with them to let the world unfold according to our hopes and affections.

Yet asking our godswhoever they, or He, may beto bend reality to our purposes has always been at best a chancy undertaking. No matter what we ask or offer, the innocent suffer, and the innocent die; some are rich, others poor; some lives seem charmed, others cursed. The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, writes the cold-eyed author of the Book of Ecclesiastes, neither yet bread to the wise, nor riches to men of understanding, neither favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all. From the Hebrew Bible to The Iliad to the mythical American Camelot, a theme runs steadily through the human story. It was succinctly stated by our King Arthur, John F. Kennedy, who appreciated the ironies and tragedies of history. Life, he once observed, is unfair.

We are left, then, with the work of redemptionof seeking order, however fleeting, in the chaos, and love amid what the Book of Common Prayer calls the changes and chances of this mortal life. Such is the function of familial and friendly caritas , of religion, of poetry, and of philosophy: the imposition of meaning and stability in a world in which all life, at least so far as we can know for certain, ends at the grave.

In the marvelous meditation of the following pages, the late A. Bartlett GiamattiRenaissance scholar, president of Yale University, commissioner of Major League Baseballturns to the deepest issues of human life and how the games Americans play at once restate the questions and point us toward some kinds of answers. Tracing the ideas of play, sport, city, religion, ritual, will, and imagination from farthest antiquity through 1989, the year the book was first published, Giamatti takes the greatest of American games, baseball, seriouslysome might say too seriously, dismissing a book like this as an overblown effort to assign cultural, philosophical, and sociological weight to what is sometimes minimized by that falsest of phrases: just a game .

To wave baseball off as just a game is like referring to the global events of 19391945 as just a war. No one can experience Giamattis argument for the centrality and the significance of leisurea concept that includes baseballand come away without renewed or, for first-time readers, fresh respect for a mind and a heart capable of placing a pastime he loved in the full flood of time, not to the side or as an afterthought or as a distraction.

For Giamatti knew the tragedy of the game, and of life, in his bones; as he remarked elsewhere, baseball will always break your heart. Yet he also understood that the game has the capacity to allow its participants and its spectatorsits priests and its congregants, if you willto transcend the tragic, at least for a time. He thus arrives at a vision of baseball as a metaphor for the hunger for home, for security and sanctity and shelter from the storms of a transitory life. Think about it: a batter begins there, takes his chances and sometimes ends up on base, working his way around to well, in the best of all possible worlds, to home . The journey is perilous and the wayfarers fail more often than they succeedwhich, when you stop to ponder things, is true of many of us.

The joy, however, is in the journey, in the quest for the place you love, and where you are loved. So home is the goalrarely glimpsed, almost never attainedof all the heroes descended from Odysseus, writes Giamatti. All literary romance derives from the Odyssey and is about rejoiningrejoining a beloved, rejoining parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder.

Putting things aright : a noble goal, but one that is finally beyond us. Giamattis brilliance is that he sees how baseball is, in the end, a storya Romance Epic, in his formulationand we tell ourselves stories to stave off the disorder, to make sense of the insensible.

And not only we as individuals, but we as a nation. If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss, and the hope for reunionif baseball is a Romance Epicit is finally told by the audience, Giamatti writes. It is the Romance Epic of homecoming America sings to itself. It is American because it approximates America at her best: a level playing field, a fresh start every day, a value on merit, not birth, and a premium on practice, not publicity, for what matters on the field is what you do, not who you are; the plays you make, not the pay you take home.

This book was first published in 1989, in another time, another country, another world. Like the game itself, though, there is something eternal about its language, about its insights, about its truths. To read it again is to be pulled home; to read it for the first time is to hear the voice of a Homeric philosopher of a great game, an exemplar of intellectual engagement with the life of the nation that includes but is not limited to the Republic of Letters. Tragedy, romance, epicit is all here, in this book as well as this life, and with this new edition comes a new season for Giamatti, and for all of us.