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This article originally appeared at Chronicle.com.

It begins when you read a piece of literature that reminds you why we
read literature: an essay with sentences you wish you had written, a
poem you receive like a gift, a novel that self-helps you better than
any self-help book. You find yourself writing in the margin, using
symbols that embarrass you (exclamation points!), scribbling YES!, and
making stars, asterisks, and vertical lines to mark passages that you
read and reread and read again aloud. With urgency and heat, you
underline and highlight.

You elbow room for the work in the syllabus. You adjust the whole
course to accommodate that one piece of writing. You can’t wait to
assign it to students. It will change their lives. They will love you
for this.

Then comes the day. You wait for the class to weigh in. You wait to
hear from the student who always get it, the one you count on to point
out what others have missed, who serves as a proxy for you and often
leads the class. You wait to hear from the passionate reader whose mind,
free from the itchy constraints of critical analysis, always finds
something to like about a piece. You wait to hear from the student whose
spoken language is tortured by notions of what he thinks sounds smart;
usually you can barely figure out what he is trying to say, but that
doesn’t stop him from going on about how much he got out of the reading.
And you wait for the slacker who comes to class having no more than
skimmed the assignment, yet who manages to say something, often funny, sometimes intentionally.

Then you notice they are all looking at their notebooks, fondling
their iPads, doing anything else they can think of to avoid looking at
you, with your face all kid-happy. Because they know that they are going
to disappoint you. And then they do.

It was OK, one of them says.

It was too long.

I didn’t get it.

I thought it was boring, the slacker says.

The class leader claims it was sentimental, flawed.

The sentimental girl–the one who always finds something to love in a
piece of writing–checks that her pen is still healthy and won’t make eye
contact.

The work that induced that reaction six times, in graduate and
undergraduate courses, at two universities and one medium-security
prison, was an essay by the late A. Bartlett Giamatti, Red Sox fan,
Renaissance scholar, president of Yale University, president of the
National League, commissioner of baseball, firer of Pete Rose, swarthy
smoker of cigarettes, and eloquent reader of texts, who died of a heart
attack at age 51. Written when he was 40, the essay, called “The Green
Fields of the Mind,” begins: “It breaks your heart. It was designed to
break your heart.”

He continued: “There comes a time when every summer will have
something of autumn about it. Whatever the reason, it seemed to me that I
was investing more and more in baseball, making the game do more of the
work that keeps time fat and slow and lazy. I was counting on the
game’s deep patterns, three strikes, three outs, three times three
innings, and its deepest impulse, to go out and back, to leave and to
return home, to set the order of the day and to organize the daylight.”

In class I ask: What is the essay about? Students understand that
it’s about the ways that baseball helps us to live, the immersion in the
immediate, the appeal of illusions of something everlasting. It is not
that they do not get it. They get it. This is not like when I ask them
to read something challenging and complex, and their distaste comes from
intimidation. With difficult texts, after we discuss them in class,
they often see what they had missed and, in retrospect, come not only to
admire but to like the work.

At first I thought the problem was that the students were too young,
or that they hated sports, or that they were plain stupid. But no. My
students just tend not to cotton to Giamatti’s flavor of sweetness. He
ends the essay with this comment on those who were born with the wisdom
to know that nothing lasts: “These are the truly tough among us, the
ones who can live without illusion, or without even the hope of
illusion. I am not that grown-up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature,
tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something
lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a
game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.”

I love this essay. My students do not.

Read the rest at Chronicle.com.

Image by Abraham Pisarek, 1948, licensed under Creative Commons by Deutsche Fotothek.

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