My First Intellectual Awakening

I was lucky enough to have had my first intellectual awakening in grammar school. I don’t remember the grade exactly, although it was probably the fourth, since we were doing long division then. I dreaded being called to the front of the class. I would stand there, my nose inches away from the blackboard, inhaling chalk dust and facing a mathematical symbol that looked like a coffin or a gibbet for my own hanging. Incredibly, our teacher wanted me to build a scaffolding of numbers underneath the gibbet that would lead, with impeccable logic, to the right answer.

Not only did I find the whole thing humiliating–as if long division were a personal matter–but I couldn’t accept the proposition that every problem had only one answer. It was unreasonable to assume that in a universe of possibilities there could be only one unique answer. Besides, the way I constructed scaffolding, it could go in a number of different directions.

The dour look I got told me that the teacher wasn’t buying it. So, I had no choice but to become obsessed with finding the right answer the way Ahab became obsessed with hunting his whale. The problem was that I kept coming up with squid. Only now, as an adult, do I realize that there’s something to be said for consistency.

It’s Lent, so here’s a confession. My awakening had nothing to do with long division, at least not directly, but with pitch count. To be more precise, it had to do with batting.

One sunny day, my friend invited me over to his house to play or listen to records or make crank phone calls to girls in our class. I don’t remember what we did–maybe all three–but at one point we joined his father in the living room to watch a Yankees game. This was sometime during the years when Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford were teammates.

As we sat there, my friend and his father analyzed each pitch, trying to predict what the pitcher would throw next. They attempted to read the pitcher the way a batter would by thinking through the possibilities based on multiple variables like pitch count, number of outs, runners on base, the guy on deck, early or late inning, etc.

I had never seen anything like this before. They did not accept what was given or wait passively for the pitcher’s windup and release. They tried to anticipate, based on a series of logical assumptions, what the batter could expect in the box. In other words, they interpreted the future based on their understanding of the past. What really grabbed my attention was the realization that, like them, I didn’t have to accept the given. I could alter it. A consciousness existed beyond the material, actionable world that could be accessed through thinking.

Decades later, I came across this again in graduate school studying Hans-Georg Gadamer, but that’s another story with another awakening. Ironically, I could have used this new insight to justify my multiple-answer theory regarding long division, but I knew my teacher would have just given me another look and assigned more homework as punishment. The gibbet awaited.

Several things came out of this like the realization that not only answers could depend on the viewpoint of the observer, but questions, too. Analytical insight could be applied to everything. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not about to feel my way through calculations of wing lift, for instance, where there should be only one right answer, but this new insight has helped me evaluate news, events, and people. Now, I don’t take anything as given and nothing for granted.

Even so, this does have a potential downside. When you start to doubt everything and everyone, you could end up living in a pithos or large ceramic jar like Diogenes. Granted, he had a lot more going on than pitch count. He didn’t bathe all that much, either. Although I do bathe, analyzing everything does make me more of a cynic (see I, Ruinator). It also makes me impatient with people who beat you over the head with their certainty.

Finally, I don’t think it’s an accident that my first intellectual awakening came from baseball. The older I get, the more I see it as a spiritual practice. One with a 100-mph fastball, which is perfect. You blink and it’s gone.

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