'The Green Fields of the Mind,' Bart Giamatti, 'The real activity was done with the radio'

Bart Giamatti, "The Green Fields of the Mind:" "It breaks your heart. It was designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again,

• and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come,

• it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

• You count on it, rely on it to buffer the passage of time, to keep the memory of sunshine and high skies alive, and then,

• just when the days are all twilight, when you need it most, it stops....  

The real activity was done with the radio-not the all-seeing, all-falsifying television-and was the playing of the game in the only place it will last, the enclosed green field of the mind. There, in that warm, bright place, what the old poet called Mutability does not so quickly come....

Of course, there are those who learn after the first few times. They grow out of sports. And there are others who were born with the wisdom to know that nothing lasts. These are the truly tough among us, the ones who can live without illusion. I am not that grown up or up-to-date. I am a simpler creature, tied to more primitive patterns and cycles. I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun." 

From "The Green Fields of the Mind," by A. Bartlett Giamatti

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