The Art of Fielding: A Novel

by Chad Harbach

3. There are three stages: Thoughtless being. Thought. Return to thoughtless being. 33. Do not confuse the first and third stages. Thoughtless being is attained by everyone, the return to thoughtless being by a very few.

He didn’t want to discuss it anymore either. It dawned on him—as it hadn’t before; he was dense, he was slow—that his parents were five hundred miles away. They could make him come home, they could refuse to pay the portion of his tuition they’d agreed to pay, but they couldn’t see his jeans. “Understood,” he said.

He wished that college required you to use your body more, forced you to remember more often that life was lived in four dimensions.

Owen didn’t want anything from Coach Cox—not a starting job, or a better spot in the batting order, or even any advice—and so Coach Cox could afford to treat him as an equal. Much the same way, perhaps, that a priest appreciates his lone agnostic parishioner, the one who doesn’t want to be saved but keeps showing up for the stained glass and the singing.

The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best.

It astonished and humbled him to think that a mind could grow so rich that its every gesture would come to seem profound.

He already knew he could coach. All you had to do was look at each of your players and ask yourself: What story does this guy wish someone would tell him about himself? And then you told the guy that story. You told it with a hint of doom. You included his flaws. You emphasized the obstacles that could prevent him from succeeding. That was what made the story epic: the player, the hero, had to suffer mightily en route to his final triumph. 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, and so was more like a torturer.

Had he learned—would he ever learn—to discard the thoughts he could not use? It remained an open question, how much sympathy love could stand.

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

“The pain is like a gas,” counseled Schwartz. He supervised from a metal folding chair, a newspaper in his lap and towel-wrapped ice bags on both knees. “It expands to fill up whatever space you give it. So we shouldn’t fear pain. A lot of it doesn’t hurt much more, or take up more psychic space, than a little bit. Viktor Frankl.”

That was the last thing he wanted her to think, even if it was true.

The Human Condition being, basically, that we’re alive and have access to beauty, can even erratically create it, but will someday be dead and will not.

The check proved that she’d been alive these weeks, that she’d accomplished something, however trivial. This was why people grew so attached to earning money, even money they didn’t need. This was how they justified themselves. This was how they kept score.

He felt a touch of sadness now that it had happened, now that he knew what it was like. Not because it wasn’t enjoyable, or wouldn’t be repeated, but because one more of life’s mysteries had been revealed.

Literature could turn you into an asshole; he’d learned that teaching grad-school seminars. It could teach you to treat real people the way you did characters, as instruments of your own intellectual pleasure, cadavers on which to practice your critical faculties.

Maybe it wasn’t even baseball that he loved but only this idea of perfection, a perfectly simple life in which every move had meaning, and baseball was just the medium through which he could make that happen.

It sounded crazy, sure. But what did it mean if your deepest hope, the premise on which you’d based your whole life, sounded crazy as soon as you put it in words? It meant you were crazy.

Henry knew better than to want freedom. The only life worth living was the unfree life, the life Schwartz had taught him, the life in which you were chained to your one true wish, the wish to be simple and perfect.

What difference did it make what religion you were if you were dead?

If big men ran the world, as was often supposed, you’d think they could get the furniture right.

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. Solomon and Lincoln: This too shall pass. Damn right it will. Or Chekhov: Nothing passes. Equally true.

Deep down, he thought, we all believe we’re God. We secretly believe that the outcome of the game depends on us, even when we’re only watching—on the way we breathe in, the way we breathe out, the T-shirt we wear, whether we close our eyes as the pitch leaves the pitcher’s hand and heads toward Schwartz.

Each of us, deep down, believes that the whole world issues from his own precious body, like images projected from a tiny slide onto an earth-sized screen. And then, deeper down, each of us knows he’s wrong.

The giddiness deepened into bliss. His limbs lacked energy to move, but a different type of energy was moving through them, originating somewhere in his bones and organs and spilling outward, scrubbing and scouring him from within, suffusing him to his skin. Maybe it was Schwartz’s presence, maybe it was the fact that the Harpooners had won the national championship—but the bliss laughed at those things, and Henry realized that they were irrelevant where the bliss was concerned. Maybe this was what dying felt like.

He had begun to imagine that the bliss was a function of morphine or some other spectacular sparkling drug being shuttled into his blood. But maybe it was mere food that was making him feel like this. In which case maybe it was worth it not to eat for a few weeks, to reach this bliss at the end.

“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.

He spun his hips and whipped his arm, feeling nothing, less than nothing, no sense of foreboding or anticipation, no liveliness, no weight, no itch or sentience in his fingertips, no fear, no hope.