BaseballAndHome - The Monday Morning Memo

name, for a moment, “home.” Home is an English word virtually impossible to translate into other tongues. No translation catches the associations, the mixture of memory and longing, the sense of security and autonomy and accessibility, the aroma of inclusiveness, of freedom from wariness that cling to the word “home” and are absent from “house” or even “my house.” Home is a concept, not a place. It is a state of mind where self-definition starts. It is origins: a mix of time and place and smell and weather wherein one first realizes one is an original. Perhaps like others, especially those one loves, but discreet, distinct, not to be copied. Home is where one first learned to be separate. And it remains in the mind as the place where reunion, if it were ever to occur, would happen… All literary romance, all romance epic, derives from the Odyssey and it is about going home. It’s about rejoining – rejoining a beloved, rejoining a parent to child, rejoining a land to its rightful owner or rule. Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things and going home is where that restoration occurs because that’s where it matters most. Baseball is, of course, entirely about going home. It’s the only game you ever heard of where you want to get back to where you started; all the other games are territorial – you want to get his or her territory – not baseball. Baseball simply wants to get you from here back around to here.”

– Bart Giamatti, 1989
President of Yale University
and Commissioner of Major League Baseball

“It is a landscape in a minor key. A sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together in a silver-green blur… It is a poetic setting, one which suggests inner meanings and invisible connections. The effect is distinctly Chinese. A visitor experiences the feeling that he has been pulled into a Sung dynasty painting… This Skagit Valley, in fact, inspired a school of neo-Chinese painters. In the Forties, Mark Tobey, Morris Graves and their gray-on-gray disciples turned their backs on cubist composition and European color and using the shapes and shades of this misty terrain as a springboard, began to paint the visions of the inner eye. A school of sodden, contemplative poets emerged here, too.”

- Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction, p. 56-57, imperfectly transcribed from seat 2E on Feb. 19, 2016, as I return home from a dim and drizzly 2 days in Oregon.