It’s Super Bowl Sunday and third of all Americans will watch the game. We will also officially declare unconditional surrender of our New Year’s resolution to eat and drink less. We will gorge on guac, wings, pizza, dips, beer, and other intoxicants.
Th first question these facts raise is, what are the other 200 million people going to be doing to amuse themselves, if not watch Super Bowl LII? Shopping, reading, playing video games, rock climbing, bird watching, sex, drugs and rock and roll? Whatever, I hope they will, as Billie Holiday sang, be getting some fun out of life.
My Dad worked a blue collar job which used a lot less brainpower than he possessed. When he got home he did his crossword, read the sports page, read detective fiction, but especially practiced what I came to think of as the Zen of Sports.
Once a week he bowled in the company league, but mostly he watched black and white, then color TV of basketball, football, golf (especially to watch his hometown hero, Jack Nicklaus), and the favorite game of his generation — baseball.
Since he believed the radio announcer for the home team was superior to the TV guy, he turned down the TV sound and listened to the call on a radio next to his easy chair. In this posture he entered the zen state of mushin, or the Taoist wu wei, comparable to a player “being in the zone.”
In short, whatever our amusements they allow us to take our minds off the daily grind or the alarming state of the world, to be attentive but unstriving. In the grim year of 1931, here’s the verse that began “As Time Goes By.”
This day and age we’re living in
Gives cause for apprehension,
With speed and new invention…
So we must get down to earth at times,
Relax, relieve the tension.
Never more so than now, with a divided country and world, a divisive president in office, and a conspiracy by a foreign power to put him there. Mercifully, Trump has said he will forego the annoying tradition of the president intruding on the Super Bowl with a self-serving appearance. The competition of a sporting event is comparatively pure alongside the agon of politics. We flee to such joys to avoid shameless partisans for a day.
Figuring out how to survive times of trouble is nothing new. In our time, some oppose, resist, engage, protest and plot. Others go along to get along, bend the knee, acquiesce, bide their time, hunker down. Still others try to disengage entirely, to vanish into a psychic expatriation. Role models abound.
The monks of the Middle Ages often left the quotidian world behind and occupied an alternative reality. They built their Houses distant from crowds, courts and corruption — atop a mountain, on an island, up a hidden valley. Monte Cassino, Grand Chartreuse, Mont Saint-Michel, Iona, Lindisfarne, Fountains and Tintern Abbey.
Many a burned-out victim of the world and its troubles has chosen to self-exile. After enduring a world of hurt, Voltaire’s Candide concluded the path to peace of mind is to avoid the hurly-burly of the world and cultivate one’s own garden. Voltaire himself, too wittily outspoken for the taste of the absolute monarchs Frederick the Great and Louis XV, slipped over the border from France into Switzerland until the heat was off.
Kenneth Clark in “Civilization” offered an intriguing remark that struck me then and has stayed with me ever since: “The wars of religion evoked a figure new to European Civilization, though familiar in the great ages of China, the intellectual recluse.” It probably says something unflattering about me that this seemed an appealing job description when the Clark series debuted in turbulent 1969, like ours a time presided over by a malign leader.
The modus vivendi for such an intellectual recluse was to “keep quiet, work in solitude, conform outwardly, inwardly remain free.” Clark’s heroic exemplar of such as figure was Michel de Montaigne. He retreated from public life to the safety of a tower room library at his chateaux outside Bordeaux.
There he invented the personal essay and cast an amused, skeptical, less deceived eye on all he saw. In an age of catastrophic, blood-soaked religious strife, he decided that “in trying to make themselves angels, men transform themselves into beasts.”
We too are unlucky enough to live in a time of political wars conducted with religious fervor, first against fascists, then communists, and now against one another. We can obsess about our downward spiral 24/7, and join the hooray-for-our-side folks at MSNBC, Fox, Breitbart, and The Daily Beast. And many do.
But not today. I intend to try to get a little fun out of life. Rather than worry about the war of Liberal against Conservative, Communitarian against Libertarian, Democrat against Autocrat, Plutocrat against Plebeian, I intend to watch the war of Patriots against Eagles, and eat too much. Tomorrow I’ll decide whether to resist, acquiesce, or cultivate my garden, retreat to my tower, and refuse to come out until the barbarian plague has passed.