Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould Read Free Book Online Page B

intelligible.
    Time includes arrows of direction that tell stories in distinct stages, causally linked—birth to death, rags to riches.
    Time also flows in cycles of repetition that locate a necessary stability amid the confusion of life—days, years, generations.
    Cycles of repetition, based in nature, once surrounded us and shaped our daily lives. We sowed in the spring, reaped in the fall, froze in the winter, and frequented the ol’ swimmin’ hole in the summer.
    Urban life has vitiated these rhythms. We become insensible to seasons in a world of air-conditioning and nectarines available throughout the year at Korean all-night fruit stores.
     
    First published in the New York Times , April 4, 1988. Reprinted with permission of the New York Times.
     
    We must therefore create cycles from the flow of culture—for our need has not abated. Thus, we celebrate holidays and other largely artificial rituals, set at appointed times. The seasons may be utterly lost in Southern California, but San Diegans still eat turkey in November, spend money in December, and watch fireworks in July.
    Spring marks the true beginning of the year. Spring signifies renewal, rebirth. Spring (up here in New England, where seasonality still pokes through the asphalt jungle) is the yearly sequence of crocus to forsythia to tulip to rose. The Romans understood and began their year at this right time—so that September, October, November, and December (as their etymology still proclaims) were once the seventh, eighth, ninth, and tenth months of a year that started in March.
    But spring, to all thinking, feeling, caring, red-blooded Americans, can only mean one thing—if you will accept my premise that culture must now substitute for nature in symbols of cyclic repetition.
    Spring marks the return of baseball—opening day, the true inception of another year. Forget the inebriation of a cold January morning. Time, as Tom Boswell so aptly remarked, begins on opening day.
    Baseball fulfills both our needs for arrows (to forge time into stories) and cycles (to grant stability, predictability and place).
    Opening day marks our annual renewal after a winter of discontent. But opening day also records the arrow of time in two distinct ways.
    It evokes the bittersweet passage of our own lives—as I take my son to the game, and remember when I held my father’s hand and wondered if DiMag would hit .350 that year.
    And opening day promises another fine season of drama—an arrow that will run through October, telling its stories of triumph and tragedy as the world turns and yet another summer cycles past.

More Power to Him
    I n 1927, when my father turned twelve, Al Jolson inaugurated the era of sound movies with The Jazz Singer , Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein’s Show Boat opened on Broadway, Charles Lindbergh flew the Spirit of St. Louis across the Atlantic nonstop to Paris, the state of Massachusetts executed Sacco and Vanzetti, and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in a single season.
    Roger Maris bested the Babe with 61 in 1961, the summer of my nineteenth birthday, with teammate Mickey Mantle batting just afterward and reaching 54 in one of the two greatest home run derbies in baseball history. This summer, Mark McGwire has already broken 61, and may even reach 70—with Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs just behind, or perhaps in front, in the other greatest derby ever. My two sons, both fans in their different ways, will turn twenty-nine and twenty-five.
     
    First published as “How the New Sultan of Swat Measures Up” in the Wall Street Journal , September 10, 1998.
     
    This magic number, this greatest record in American sports, obsesses us for at least three good reasons. First, baseball has changed no major rule in a century, and we can therefore look and compare, in genuine continuity, across the generations. The seasons of our lives move inexorably forward. As my father saw Ruth, I followed Maris, and my sons watch McGwire. But the game also