Take Time for Paradise by A. Bartlett Giamatti

His lyricism reaches its height in a chapter on baseball, to which he gives the highfalutin title “Baseball as Narrative.” But perhaps the author’s intention is best expressed in the title of the book, which must be read as an exhortation to participate in sports. In the end, the tract seems to be a philosophical justification for the sentimentality Giamatti clearly feels for American sports. “Sports,” he writes, “represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious.” The longing for this garden of Eden, he suggests, draws us to the ballparks. We do not seek immortality by setting records, he says it is the communal experience that is paramount. Giamatti opposes those who maintain that the industrial revolution knocked down the gods to whose greater glory we used to perform athletic achievements. Peppered with Greek phrases and alluding to a variety of scholars from Aristotle on who have philosophized on the idea of leisure, “Take Time for Paradise” argues-unoriginally-that organized sport constitutes a sort of religious ritual. Of course, baseball knew it was hiring the president of Yale University to run its affairs, but it’s hard to imagine Giamatti explaining to Pete Rose, when the Cincinnati Reds manager was barred from the sport for life for gambling offences: “Pete, buddy, I’m sorry, but when the rules designed to sustain the convention that lawful skill (or skill lawfully applied) can win the day, that the game is a meritocracy, are weak or not enforced, then the quest for a covert edge will always threaten to shatter the whole enterprise.” Urn:oclc:639161297 Republisher_date 20120822201553 Republisher_operator Scandate 20120822125251 Scanner is difficult to believe that the author of this philosophical meditation subtitled “Americans and Their Games” is the same Bart Giamatti who served as Commissioner of Major League Baseball from last April until his death in September.

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Take Time for Paradise by A. Bartlett Giamatti