Nándor Hidegkuti
Harry Johnston was an outstanding defender who played nearly twenty years for Blackpool, mostly as a center-back. He was so good that in 1951 the FA named him footballer of the year. He played for his country as well, making his last appearance in 1953, at Wembley, against the upstart Magyars from Hungary, but that would not be a good day for Harry. The problem was Nándor Hidegkuti.Hungary kicked off to start the game, and moved the ball into English territory. A long pass down the right flank was knocked out of bounds: possession to Hungary. But the referee ruled that on the throw-in the Hungarian player had stepped into the field of play and gave possession to England. The Hungarians intercepted and passed to Hidegkuti, centrally located, outside the box. He was, the English understood, a center-forward, so it wasn’t clear what he might be doing quite so far from the goal. Harry Johnston backed off a bit. Hidegkuti faked a shot (or maybe a pass) to his right, paused an instant, then pushed the ball a yard or so forward, just into the box now, and simply lashed a shot into the upper-left corner of of the net. Forty-five seconds had elapsed.
Things have now changed so radically in the rare book world – dragged along limply in the wake of the IT revolution – that, today, neither integer of Greene’s description pertains as it used to. For most book collectors – and there seem to be fewer and fewer of them – finding what you want is now so easy that the only real consideration is what you are able or willing to pay. Twenty-five years ago, first editions of Kerouac’s On the Road were both scarce and valuable. Nowadays they still cost a lot, but there are masses of them on offer (abebooks.com lists 103 of them, priced between £3.84 and 18,562.60). It may be that a similarly large number were out there in the past, but nobody knew where they were. You had to find them, encounter them serendipitously one at a time.So two things have happened, and they threaten to cut our archetype off at the knees: “treasure” is now common, and “hunting” involves nothing more exciting or time-consuming than booting up a computer and surfing the rare book sites. You want to collect Conrad? You could build a virtually complete collection in the next hour or two. What the hell fun would that be?
To most people, … theatre at Oxford means the theatre outdoors, beside the lake at Worcester, on the great shabby lawn at Trinity, or beneath the noble purple beech of Wadham. I am not myself irresistibly attracted by the prospect of an evening with Beaumont, Fletcher and the midges, but I admit the magic of those occasions if the evening is fine and you can watch them from an independent distance. I was once loitering around Magdalen on a classic May evening when I saw a company of players making their way through the Grove for a performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They were moving swiftly in their cowls, ruffs and velvets, all among the elms, and a few shy deer watched them pass between the tree trunks. Their footfalls were silent on the turf, their voices reached me faintly on the warm air, and they disappeared into the shadows merrily, with Puck occasionally practicing his jumps, and Titania lifting her crimson skirts, and a few lumpish fairies skirmishing in the flanks. I never caught the spell of the theatre more hauntingly, as I watched them across the fence, and felt rather like Hamlet when the players came to Elsinore — ‘You are welcome, masters, welcome all.’
Can any of us claim seriously to feel at all confident of sharing the feelings of a poor Roman Jew — or a Roman senator’s well-heeled wife — as they sat together in a threatened domus ecclesia (a house church) in the mid-sxities AD and listened as Mark or some literate friend read the agony scene in Mark’s gospel — Jesus terrified in the lonely hours before his arrest — while, a few yards away, Nero’s or Galba’s police combed the streets for bodies to feed an imperial craving for scapegoats? Or try imagining the contrary pulls on a young Greek sailor as he paused near the harbor in Ephesus, by the great temple of Artemis with its many-breasted statue of the godess, and then chose to follow a gently importunate man from the Jesus sect up a blind alley into a dim room to hear the ancient Beloved Disciple recount Jesus’ fourth and last appearance after death. Now try to convey your imagined experience to others less resourceful than you.Such exercises are both entirely legitimate and also laughable; they smack more of the ludicrous Hollywood fumblings in Quo Vadis or Ben Hur. In fact, we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago — burdened with all the assumptions and hopes of our past lives; then confronted in words by the flaming demands of a recently dead, maybe resurrected Jew named Jesus with a ravenous will to change us and the Earth.
It began with a girl who was loved by God.
The takedown
Yesterday I posted a little piece over at The Run of Play on the inexplicably lousy season Inter Milan is having. The analogy that struck me was that the team seems to have something like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome: they’re not lazy, they’re not slacking off, but they seem somehow to be incapable of energetic and coherent action. I still think that that’s a good analogy, but I wondered if someone might be bothered by it, so I wrote to an acquaintance who has suffered for a long time with CFS. He replied that since it was obviously an analogy he had no problem with it, and added — he has significant hearing loss — that if I wanted to say “The referee turned a deaf ear to the team’s demands for a penalty” that would be okay also.
So I posted my thoughts, only to hear from three people who were deeply offended by it — genuinely hurt. So I asked Brian to take the post down, and he did. I mean, it’s just a little bagatelle about soccer, not something worth hurting people’s feelings about. I truly do not want to cause pain, and people who suffer from CFS do have the added fustration of dealing with skeptics who think “it’s all in their head.” I don’t want to add to that.
And yet, at the risk of undoing a good deed, I want to say that I’m not sure that I should have taken the post down; and I wouldn’t have done it if more significant issues had been at stake. When we write we want to be responsive to appropriate sensitivities, but people can be oversensitive, and to defer to those people is to hamstring public discourse.
There’s a time to say “I’m sorry” and a time to say “Get over yourself,” and it’s really hard to know, sometimes, which time it is. But when all we’re dealing with is a blog post about soccer, I think it’s probably better to err on the side of sensitivity. As I say, I neither wanted nor expected to hurt anyone’s feelings. But you can see, I hope, why this is a complicated situation.
And a little coda: one CFS sufferer — and I do indeed mean sufferer — quoted approvingly a person who had had both CFS and cancer and claimed that “cancer is a picnic compared to CFS.” Maybe this is just my own experience (as someone who has lost loved ones to agonizing death by cancer) speaking, but I don’t think that’s an argument people with CFS should make unless they want to eliminate every last shred of sympathy the public might have for them. CFS is a genuinely horrible thing to go through, but you don’t convince people of that by minimizing the effects of cancer, of all things.
Cherry blossom by Terada Mokei (via things mag)
Do we actually need this intensification of self that novels provide? Do we need it more than ever before?I suspect not. If we asked the question of, for example, a Buddhist priest, he or she would probably tell us that it is precisely this illusion of selfhood that makes so many in the West unhappy. We are in thrall to the narrative of selves that do not really exist in the way we imagine, a fabrication in which most novel-writing connives. Schopenhauer would have agreed. He spoke of people “deluded into an absolutely false view of life by reading novels,” something that “generally has the most harmful effect on their whole lives.” Like the Buddhist priest, he would have preferred silence or the school of experience, or the kind of myth or fable that did not invite excited identification with an author alter ego.