I can’t stop watching the World Cup. I watch it live on my laptop, two games a day starting at 7:00am, then recaps, then the post-prandial World Cup Daily podcast with James Richardson. I’ve been thinking a lot about whence this obsession springs and have hit upon a number of flattering theses. One of them is that I am building a Theory of Man while watching, so it isn’t really a waste of time. Another is that I am brushing up on my geography, history, and cultural stereotypes, which is also mostly not a waste of time. I feel caught in the embrace of a giant. I feel like Jonah in the belly of the whale, a Jonah with his feet up, eating potato chips and rooting for the Côte d’Ivoire.
Then there’s this:
“The rest of the world follows a sport that rewards resilience and neuroticism. Soccer is a sport perfectly designed to reinforce a tragic view of the universe, because basically it is a long series of frustrations leading up to near certain heartbreak.”
Exactly!
(Read the rest of that article here.)
I also love how everyone falls so flamboyantly and acts like everything hurts so much, because a) it probably does hurt so much, and b) it’s so theatrical and unheroic, or at least unstoic. I think the players get that they are playing out the great drama of human existence for us. It seems bigger than everyone, bigger even that the biggest stars, because everyone remembers everything, and the memory of football is the memory of colonialism, among other things. Every game feels informed by the entire history of the world. Not kidding!
I have more thinking to do on this topic, which in any case was only meant to serve as a segue to this bit from Pliny my friend Andrew sent me. He wanted to know if I’d read it before I wrote Darkwood. The answer is no, even, Heck, no!, even, Pliny who? But anyway, I really like it:
In Italy also it is believed that there is a noxious influence in the eye of a wolf; it is supposed that it will instantly take away the voice of a man, if it is the first to see him. Africa and Egypt produce wolves of a sluggish and stunted nature; those of the colder climates are fierce and savage. That men have been turned into wolves, and again restored to their original form, we must confidently look upon as untrue, unless, indeed, we are ready to believe all the tales, which, for so many ages, have been found to be fabulous. But, as the belief of it has become so firmly fixed in the minds of the common people, as to have caused the term “Versipellis” to be used as a common form of imprecation, I will here point out its origin. Euanthes, a Grecian author of no mean reputation, informs us that the Arcadians assert that a member of the family of one Anthus is chosen by lot, and then taken to a certain lake in that district, where, after suspending his clothes on an oak, he swims across the water and goes away into the desert, where he is changed into a wolf and associates with other animals of the same species for a space of nine years. If he has kept himself from beholding a man during the whole of that time, he returns to the same lake, and, after swimming across it, resumes his original form, only with the addition of nine years in age to his former appearance. To this Fabius adds, that he takes his former clothes as well. It is really wonderful to what a length the credulity of the Greeks will go! There is no falsehood, if ever so barefaced, to which some of them cannot be found to bear testimony.
Pliny (Natural History, 8. 34)
