The Art of Fielding: A Novel

by Chad Harbach

trying to gather as many molecules as possible under the name Henry Skrimshander.

Even when you realized you’d never make it, you didn’t relinquish the dream, not deep down.

Life was long, unless you died, and he didn’t intend to spend the next sixty years talking about the last twenty-two.

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 in the same way, an...

Schwartz didn’t know if he was ready for that—ready to not be needed.

So much of one’s life was spent reading; it made sense not to do it alone.

He’d never quite discarded the childhood belief that he could alter the course of distant or natural events with his mind.

The more he saw him, the more he missed not seeing him.

Didn’t love sometimes have to explain itself?

God, the stuff you filled your head with, no matter how hard you tried.

It was amazing the way people hemmed each other in, forced each other to act in such narrowly determined ways,

The fact that she’d run away from a man with a beard into the grip of another man with a beard proved that nothing would ever change, she would never change, and life wherever she lived it was bound to be the same unchanging shitstorm, because she was there.

you always lived in your head and you had to go with what you felt.

It restored some nameless element of his personality that threatened to slip away if he didn’t stay vigilant.

Humans are ridiculous creatures, she thought, or maybe it’s just me:

“Well, carpe diem, as they say. A day is a day. There are only so many of them.”

Relying on yourself wasn’t easy; it could involve strong measures.

You could only try so hard not to try too hard before you were right back around to trying too hard.

He didn’t see how a religion, which was a freely chosen thing, could mark people so irreparably.

But people didn’t forgive you for doing what felt right—that was the last thing they forgave you for.

Everyone always reaching back through the past, past their own mistakes.

He’d never found anything inside himself that was really good and pure, that wasn’t double-edged, that couldn’t just as easily become its opposite.

Talking was like throwing a baseball. You couldn’t plan it out beforehand. You just had to let go and see what happened. You had to throw out words without knowing whether anyone would catch them—you had to throw out words you knew no one would catch.

There were no whys in a person’s life, and very few hows. In the end, in search of useful wisdom, you could only come back to the most hackneyed concepts, like kindness, forbearance, infinite patience.

Men were such odd creatures. They didn’t duel anymore, even fistfights had come to seem barbaric, the old casual violence all channeled through institutions now, but still they loved to uphold their ancient codes. And what they loved even more was to forgive each other.

It was strange the way he loved her: a sidelong and almost casual love, as if loving her were simply a matter of course, too natural to mention. Like

again. “You told me once that a soul isn’t something a person is born with but something that must be built, by effort and error, study and love.