The agony... the ecstasy... mostly the agony, actually.

Today we played our annual Faculty vs. Seniors softball game. I'm not bragging when I say that our faculty plays a mean game of softball; in my seven years of playing, we've lost exactly once, in the first game of a double-header, by one run. (In the second game, we went up by over ten runs and the slaughter rule ended the game.) This afternoon we once again proved that being young, in shape, and on the varsity baseball team isn't always better than being old, crafty, and experienced: we took the first game by a decisive score of 14-4 and then held on in the second to win 6-5.

My skills with ball, bat and glove have never been much to write home about; since second grade, my last year of organized baseball, I've favored games like soccer and basketball where you can contact the ball directly, instead of those like golf or baseball where you have to use some sort of pole-arm to score any points. In my mid-20s, though, I did play softball with my dad in an adult rec league; we joined the team organized by the hospital's gastrointerology department, in which my mother worked at the time, and which changed its official monicker soon after she signed on, meaning that for years she was required to answer the departmental phone with a cheery "Digestive Diseases!"

The team, comprised of a handful of fully-qualified gastrointerologists (including one of the nation's leading specialists in Crohn's Disease), a few lab assistants, and some ringers like Dad and me, was called the Eliminators, and our colors were a sickly yellow and a deep, bold brown. I felt as though these facts were fairly indicative of my skills. I wasn't much of an offensive threat, but in those days I was still light and fairly fleet of foot, and could at least score if I got on base. I couldn't pitch or throw from the outfield, though, so on defense I played mostly catcher, thanks primarily to my having the youngest knees on the team.

Today, however, I finally appreciated just how much time has gone by since those halcyon days. Squatting in my accustomed position behind the plate for the first time since last May's game, I felt twangs and twinges in my hamstrings and groin that must have been audible at first base. Nonetheless, I had a good outing for me--two hits, no errors, one run scored. I still can't do much more than place the ball into the shallow part of the outfield, but as long as no one's there to catch the ball--hey, I could stretch my career out for another decade or two.

But for this evening, I'm standing and moving with a certain degree of stiffness, as if someone had slipped a pair of two-by-fours down my pants legs. Maybe it's time I learned to pitch.


6:39 PM

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It's not my intention to make this journal a kind of running obituary, but what else can I do? Stephen Jay Gould is dead. When it comes to writers who have influenced my thinking, there are very few who might rank ahead of Gould; from the moment I first picked up a copy of The Panda's Thumb nearly 20 years ago, I found his writing fascinating. It's hard enough to balance an essay on the wire between scientific precision and broad comprehensibility; to maintain that balance and still move forward into the realm of literature is a task requiring a whole new level of skill, and that skill is what drew me to his essays.

I have read almost every essay he ever published in Natural History magazine (with the exception of those in his two most recent collections, The Lying Stones of Marrakech and I Have Landed), as well as his book-length musings on racism (The Mismeasure of Man), the Burgess Shale (Wonderful Life), and the calendar (Questioning the Millennium). By comparison, I've read very little of the work of other essayists I love--G.K. Chesterton, E.B. White, Ralph Wiley--maybe just a book or three. But Gould's essays kept drawing me in. He never insulted my intelligence, for which I loved him; he always assumed that if he just laid out the facts and the terminology clearly, I'd be able to pick it up eventually. Even if that assumption wasn't always right, it gave me incentive to trust him, and an essayist who wins the trust of his reader is the greatest teacher of them all.

I've heard he was arrogant. If so, it was a generous arrogance. He did not treat the display of scientific knowledge as a form of conspicuous consumption, intending to inspire jealousy over the knowledge he had that we didn't; instead, he had the arrogance of the teacher, impatiently waiting for us to settle down so he could share his knowledge with us. He demanded that we look at facts for what they were, free from prejudice or assumption, but he also took great delight in examining facts of all sorts, even the trivia of baseball, Disney cartoons, or Gilbert and Sullivan.

The stories he told sometimes made me angry at human presumption, or bewildered at the astonishing variety of life, but now I find myself remembering the stories of sorrow: the Mauritian Calvaria major tree, whose seed's thick husk had to be abraded away before it could germinate, and whose reproduction therefore depended on a single bird--the dodo... the giant panda, guided into an evolutionary dead-end by overdependence on bamboo... the hermit crabs of the Caribbean, dependent on the fossilized shells of extinct snails for their protection.

Perhaps I've grown too dependent on Gould for my own intellectual stimulation, and now must make do with some less satisfactory alternative. At least there will be a time during which I can peruse his last works, including his recently-published magnum opus The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. But still, I find myself wishing that my niche had not grown so suddenly and visibly narrow.

It's funny. Gould was a materialist, fascinated with the richness of earthly life but not expecting anything beyond it. Most of his work was intended to persuade people that, in Darwin's words, "there is grandeur in this view of life." But today I find myself hoping that somewhere he's waking up, looking around, observing the facts of this new world in which he finds himself, and writing them down. It would be so comforting to me.

If only I could believe that he'd been wrong.


8:41 AM

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