After an unusually mild autumn, temperatures in the Northwest Corner have finally dropped. It was 39 degrees this afternoon, as I walked home from the University campus. Not frigid -- and the sun was shining in a cloudless, blue sky -- but cold compared with the warmer weather we've had to date.
Cold enough that I walked with my hat pulled down securely, my coat zipped up to the top, and my hands in my pockets. But still pleasant enough that I was looking about me, to see what there was to see, and thoroughly enjoying my walk.
What struck me, as I strolled through my extended neighborhood, was the large number of basketball hoops mounted on backboards to be found in driveways or on portable stands curbside. Now and then I've noticed kids shooting baskets, of course, but I'd never really thought about the hoops at which they were aiming.
It was about 3 p.m., a bit before children begin returning from school, so the nets were hanging from the hoops quietly, lonely and untended. But they reminded me of the basketball hoops my family and several neighbors had mounted in our driveways when I was in my teens. Shooting baskets was something everyone did -- even an unathletic klutz like me. Sometimes we were playing horse or two-on-two games, but often we just shot baskets as something to do -- like circling in the street on bikes -- while carrying on conversations.
As I walked today, it felt too cold to be dribbling a basketball, but as a kid the low temperature would have meant nothing. After an hour or two of messing around in the driveway, I would have wandered into the house with a runny nose and hands reddened with cold. It would never have occurred to me to complain about, or even mention, the cold.
But if some kindly neighbor had invited me to join in a game today, I would have said "no thanks," without hesitation. And would thus have missed out on what would have been -- or at least used to be -- a couple of hours of exercise, recreation, and conviviality. I find this realization saddening -- not because I'm all teared up over basketball, but because shooting baskets in cold weather is simply emblematic of a lot of things I don't do as I get older. And I don't do them not because they are activities beyond my physical capabilities or because I don't have a basketball hoop and friends to play with, but because I've grown accustomed to saying "no thanks" to many activities that once would have attracted to me.
But why? As we get older, we seem to become less interested in participating in the world around us, and more given to contemplating our own thoughts. Or to passive activities like light reading or television. (Or posting in blogs!)
The author and critic James Wood has observed how we develop with age a growing detachment from the physical world of the senses. He notes:*
the fading reality that besets details as they recede from us -- the memories of our childhood, the almost forgotten pungency of flavors, smells, textures; the slow death that we deal to the world by the sleep of our attention. By congested habit, or through laziness, lack of curiosity, thin haste, we stop looking at things.
As one grows older, Wood suggests that the
world is one in which the adventure of the ordinary -- the inexhaustibility of the ordinary as a child once experienced it ... -- is steadily retreating, in which things and objects and sensations are pacing toward meaninglessness. In such a world, the writer's task is to rescue the adventure from this slow retreat ....
How did my mind (and my post) move from basketball hoops to this perceived meaninglessness of advanced age? Good question. As kids, a basketball hoop was an exciting invitation to run about, to test our skills, to -- if nothing else -- socialize with our peers. Now a hoop -- an entire neighborhood of hoops -- is a vaguely noticed feature adorning some of the houses I pass every day. It is a feature with so little interest that I was surprised today, when I turned my mind to the topic, at how many hoops our neighborhood actually contained. Basketball hoops certainly no longer offer the "pungency of flavors, smells, textures" that I suggest they did, at least metaphorically, when I was 13 or 14.
Of course, if we were talking only about hoops, my lack of interest in them would be merely a curiosity. But I see "hoops" as a metaphor for an entire world of objects and activities that, as a child and older, I once found fascinating and deserving of close attention.
Wood suggests that the act of creative writing can slow -- by forcing increased attention to details by both reader and writer -- this drift into unconsciousness, this drift into a kind of mental death that begins long before Death itself arrives. Maybe. Maybe that suggests yet another motivation for me to keep writing in my blog. But I'm not entirely convinced that writing (at least in blogs) has the salutary effect that Wood suggests.
Game of horse, anyone?
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*James Wood, The Nearest Thing to Life (Brandeis Press 2015)
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