After my wife Bridget read the prior post it reminded her of a very powerful excerpt from one of the best books either of us have ever read, The Brothers K, by David James Duncan.  I have used little snippets from the following in prior posts but I figured the entire read would be extremely fitting, thus Part II.  Please sit down and read this; I would love to hear your thoughts, opinions or the emotions it conjures up.

“Maris was hardly the first technician to attain staggering fame through obsessive effort, only to later regret the cost. In his Autobiography—published a full century prior to Maris’s feat—Charles Darwin made a confession that reads like a manifesto of the One-Pointed Specialist’s inner condition:

Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds…gave me great pleasure, even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have also said that formerly pictures (paintings) gave me considerable, and music very great, delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost almost any taste for pictures or music…My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of a large collection of fact, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect.

That an all-consuming focus on a single object of desire could achieve a quantitatively spectacular result was no surprise to any thinking person in the early Sixties…But that the same intensity of focus which made any great quantitative achievement possible might also render it qualitatively bankrupt—that a Golden Glove MVP could accomplish fabulous feat and end up looking, feeling and playing, the following year, like a battle-jagged vet just back from some interior front line—this was the “un-American” surprise and the bitter public lesson of Roger Maris’s life.

Technical obsession is like an unlit, ever-narrowing mine shaft leading straight down through the human mind. The deeper down one plunges, the more fabulous, and often the more remunerative, the gems or ore. But the deeper down one plunges, the more confined and conditioned one’s thoughts and movements become, and the greater the danger of permanently losing one’s way back to the surface of the planet. There also seems to be an overpowering, malignant magic that reigns deep down in these shafts. And those who journey too far or stay down too long become its minions without knowing it—become not so much human beings and human tools wielded by whatever ideology, industry, force or idea happens to rule that particular mine. Another danger: because these mines are primarily mental, not physical, they do not necessarily mar or even mark the faces of those who have become utterly lost in them. A man or woman miles down, thrall to the magic, far beyond caring about anything still occurring on the planet’s surface, can sit down beside you on a park bench or bleacher seat, greet you in the street, shake your hand, look you in the eye, smile genially, say “How are you?” or “Merry Christmas!” or “How about those Yankees?” And you will never suspect that you are in the presence not of a kindred spirit, but of a subterranean force.

In 1961 the best all-around player in baseball became a kind of machine for grinding out long fly balls. As he neared Ruth’s record the man in Maris recognized the Technician of Boink for the inhuman force it was and began to grapple with it, sensing that his balance—that is, his life—was at stake. He began to lose sleep, and to have trouble eating. His hair began to fall out in clumps. Near the end of the season he would break down during post-game interviews, sometimes ranting, sometimes weeping in front of reporters. Like Darwin and Oppenheimer, Maris found after attaining his end that he had little left with which to re-prove his humanity but his confusion and regret. He would say for the rest of his life that he wished he’d never heard of Ruth’s record, let along broken it. But he did break it—and radically altered our conception of baseball heroics in doing so. Millions of traditionalists never quite forgave him for this. And one such traditionalist may have been Roger Maris himself. That may explain why the Technician of ’61 so soon became the Strike-out King of the mid-Sixties, the introverted beer distributor of the Seventies, and the cancer victim of 1985.”

-David James Duncan