People occasionally say that life has become so absurd it’s immune to parody, and it’s usually in reaction to the antics of a celebrity or a politician or the recent, hideous combination of the two – not the contents of the esteemed New York Times. But the Book Review – which every week interviews an author about his or her reading habits – featured this past Sunday Deion Sanders (co-author of a new inspirational book) who said the best book he ever received as a gift was The Little Engine That Could. Asked what three writers, living or dead, he would invite to a literary dinner party, he named as the third his co-author.
Yesterday’s lesson, from Isaiah 50:4-9a, began: “The Lord God has given me the tongue of a teacher, that I may know how to sustain the weary with a word.”
And I thought: Those were the days.
I’m off on a little Easter week jaunt, coming back here sometime next week.
Part of the madness of March is rooting for teams you never gave a thought to before. Last night I became a big Oakland University fan – they were playing perennial powerhouse Kentucky, and I never do brackets – all the while believing the school was in located somewhere in the Bay area. (Googling just now, I saw that the school is in Michigan.) The number of three-point shots that went in, for both teams, was incredible in the second half, but the Golden Grizzlies (love that name) hung on to win 80-76. And, sitting at home, conforming to the psychological tenor of the month, I felt enormous joy for a school I thought was somewhere else.
I’ve been going to the Miami Open since it was the Lipton – held in the balmy confines of Key Biscayne – and yesterday I saw something I’d never seen at the tournament: a player smashing his racket during a practice session. It was Alexander Bublik, at the end of his hit with Gaël Monfils, and, heading to his chair, he tossed the mangled racket to fans in the stands.
For St. Patrick’s Day, Books & Books posted a quote from Oscar Wilde: “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
These lines also appear in my memoir, along with the ones that precede them, which I discovered in the British Council library in Warsaw, Poland, in 1978. “With the abolition of private property, then,” Wilde wrote in The Soul of Man Under Socialism, “we shall have true, beautiful, healthy individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live.”
When I finished, I put the book back and headed out into the drab, unhappy streets of Warsaw.