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| “Anything worth doing at all,” declared G.K.Chesterton, “is worth doing badly.” And while as a fan I fear that it’s a prefabricated excuse too many English sports teams stow away in their lockers, I am nevertheless humbly happy to second his motion.
We would all like to be able to sing as sublimely as Marilyn Horne, write such telling poetry as Seamus Heaney, paint with the technical finesse of Richard Estes, hit perfect five irons with the insouciance of Darren Clarke. Because we cannot, our admiration for these virtuosi is extreme. But it is an admiration underpinned by another, a prior assessment – respect for the discipline, the medium, in which these stellar talents express themselves. Any activity transcending the level of, yes, trivial pursuits, asks questions of its disciples. Be it skiing, quilting, rose growing, bridge, whatever, the activity will demand a raft of qualities of each participant. Judgment. Patience. Strength. Co-ordination. Adaptability. And the humility that so many of us have to find when it is apparent that the answers to those question we have come up with can hardly be classed as adequate. Naturally I’m talking different horses for different courses here. An identical list of qualities will not be the dues we must pay to every pursuit. White water rafting will ask for a different cocktail of talents and mind-set than bird watching. But two basic constants can be deduced and should be underlined. First: until the hobbyist, the ‘amateur’, the aficionado – you or I, in fact – gets one on one with an activity, that activity’s interior logic (and, hence, its particular demands) will never be properly apparent. If you haven’t tried it, you won’t know what it’s about. Second: the qualities we must bring to the activity will be wanted right at the outset of our involvement. Maybe the initial demands on them will be light, but they must be there in embryo at least. The road to mediocrity is doubtless paved with good intentions but the same skills and attitudes that inform virtuoso mastery are requisite for apprentice participation. Of course, set aside all but a God-gifted few, there is an enormous shortfall in what we do achieve with our creative, leisure and (ssh!) work place endeavors. That middle-aged housewife, to manufacture a crude example, will be lucky indeed if she ever shoots below a hundred at the country club. She has only been playing golf three years. Her shoulder has incipient arthritis. Her waistline is more than a tad less slim than in her salad days. Her swing, consequently, is always going to be a cramped approximation of the textbook ideal. But – all important ‘but’! – because, although coming late to the game, she has given it her best shot, lodged in this admirable lady’s mind (she’s growing on me; how do I get her number?) is the image, the concept, of that perfect swing. And a hope. Perhaps on one fine day as she goes to address the ball something will pop free and, this once, hands, head and weight transfer will all optimally coalesce. The ball will go straight down the middle propelled by the perfect drive. No. It won’t. It’s never going to happen. But if what she comes up with on a regular basis is her best, her marginally improving, shot, it doesn’t matter. She has a good time out there on the fairways (or their vicinity) herself and when she sees Tiger Woods get it absolutely right, she sees it from inside. Her pleasure is far sharper than that of the casual, non-golfing viewer. And, all unbeknowingly, Augusta Sandtrapper (let’s call her) enables us presumptuously to tack an important rider on to Chesterton’s dictum: “…it’s worth doing badly provided you are trying your darndest.” Descent via Ms. Augusta from the sublime to the klutz brings us, let me fess up, to me. In my sixties I find myself eyeball to eyeball with Classical Greek. Hobby? Time-killer? Mental aerobics aimed at keeping off Alzheimer’s? Something of all three, probably. But something else as well, I hope. At High School (give or take) I had five years of studying Greek. For most of that time I never saw the wood for the trees.
Third parties are not relevant. The forty-something executive who takes up the violin and two years later hires the Hollywood Bowl and the L.A. Symphony so as to entertain his friends with the Mendelssohn has so far lost his sense of modesty as to no longer know his place. Or, as the first half of Chesterton’s remark more simply reminds us, the executive is unaware that what he showboatingly proposes isn’t worth doing in the first place. A becoming modesty is essential to those setting off on a serious, that is to say untrivial, pursuit. To introduce ego is to poison the relationship. Thus the nut who can recite in order and with dates all the plays that Johnny Unitas called while quarterbacking the Colts is to be pitied. He (or she!) is only using the arbitrary medium as the backdrop to his own grandstanding. He has made this the one area in his life where he can exercise control, the sadly safe little corner where he can ego trip without, er, tripping. Again, it wasn’t at all worth doing, son. But back to what is. Since the object of the exercise is precisely the exercise for its own spirit enhancing sake, whether ‘doing badly’ status ever converts into ‘halfways O.K.’ or even ‘like a champion’ is besides the point. This is another instance where the journey not the arrival matters. But as we travel through this extra-curricular neck of the woods one thought must fuel our enthusiasm. If you’re going to do something badly because doing that something is fun you might as well do it up right. Come on! Whatever it is you’ve been meaning to try, go for it! Extend your swing and let your mind take flight. |
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Lessons were hardly more than a succession of seriously difficult intelligence tests. Then, just as a university career was pointing me in new directions, a faint glimmer of the allegedly dead language’s beauty and extraordinary efficiency filtered through to me from out of the mists of rote learning. Too late. Well, too late for the next half century. Belatedly, I am now sitting down to wrestle with this infuriatingly quirky, willfully (as it seems) irregular, amazingly precise and yet dancingly flexible language. As I struggle with declensions and moods and seemingly endless vocabulary I am well aware that on a scale of zero to ten I will never get beyond two – if that. But no matter. Every now and then, that schoolboy glimmer of understanding blazes fitfully up. It soon dies again but, briefly, I have had a sense of how this ancestor of my own native tongue allowed Aeschylus and Plato and Pythagoras to lay down the intellectual foundation of the Western world within the span of three short generations: of how it came about that within one man’s living memory of Athens’s bestriding the thinking world, those who conversed in this language were subjects of a foreign power. But let me not grow obsessive. Chesterton was limiting his observation to the channel between the activity and the disciple.
