Florida Pier : writings and about / jmcvey.net
The Feeling for Games
“The Gentler View,” Harper’s Weekly (June 24, 1911) : 21
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If one has been born without the feeling for games one side of life remains forever closed to us; yet it is forever puzzlingly present in the lives of other people. Games are engrossing thousands, and, even when the thousands are not seen actively engaged in the games, they retain their sense of the rules and of the spirit of play. It guides them through other phases of life until the stamp of it upon them is so strong that one regards it as their sole means of education.
With all amiability one is willing, even anxious, to learn to acquire this enthusiasm. There is hardly any game that one has not at one time or another been conducted kindly through, only to come out at the end blank of all knowledge as to the why or the wherefore, utterly untouched by that mysterious something which animated so extravagantly one’s fellow-players. You catch from the outside the proper attitude to have. Dimly you see the symbols of the inward fire you cannot arouse in yourself. The sentiments to be imitated are a rapt absorption that renders one impervious to all outward claims, a passionate knowledge of rules and unflagging interest in the score, a perpetual flow of hot protests and encouraging remarks couched in terms so technical as to be wholly cryptic, a spirit of comradeship such as only sieges and combats to the death are supposed to engender, and a willingness to shout at the end of the game explanatory remarks of why you did everything you did, to other people who are shouting at you the precise reason they made you the returns they did, and how, if the precise obstacle that did intervene had not intervened, the score would have been radically altered.
Theoretically sport interests you exceedingly, you like the idea of it, and, stretched in a chair with a book in your lap and the pleasant sounds of a game in progress at a distance, you rather fancy yourself to have the makings of an athlete in you. Toward all this you, the person born blank of the feeling for games, have the friendliest of attitudes. Theoretically sport interests you exceedingly, you like the idea of it, and, stretched in a chair with a book in your lap and the pleasant sounds of a game in progress at a distance, you rather fancy yourself to have the makings of an athlete in you. When from some philanthropic reason you join in, to make up the requisite number, or to cherish in the mind of a friend her conception of you as a nice companionable person, a baffling veil is encountered. It wraps itself around you and produces a sleepiness in you, a vagueness that in the eyes of the rest looks like feeble-mindedness. You cannot for the life of you remember that you are playing, and when it is your turn you are found to be dreaming or surreptitiously reading your book, which results for you in permanent and increasing disgrace. You are accused of interrupting when all you did was to introduce an argument about something not pertaining to the game, which struck you as so much more interesting. You never grasp thoroughly why it is necessary to do the thing they tell you to do, and when they explain that you have made a splendid play you feel no excitement, because it so closely resembles the plays they considered dufferish. A mere matter of an inch more or less on one side or the other does not seem to justify their partiality and emotion. A mere matter of an inch more or less on one side or the other does not seem to justify their partiality and emotion.
Try as you will, you cannot overcome the habit of asking why a rule is the rule when you have just been told that it is the rule. Every one acts as though you had committed sacrilege. Underneath your surface chagrin is a slight scorn of their conservatism, and a conviction that, though you never expect any one to agree with you, it is more open-minded to change a rule which is obviously irrational and inconvenient than to feel an encrusted and unfounded respect for it that prevents examining frankly its real claims to respect.
No game could be boresome the first time it is played, because of the diversion to be derived from an introduction to its insisted-upon absurdities. If you stop just before a play and say, “Why were games invented?” or ask if it really matters your going backward rather than forward, people exclaim angrily that you are bored and there is no use in your going on if that is the way you feel, which is so unjust, as you are not at all bored, but merely of an inquiring mind. No game could be boresome the first time it is played, because of the diversion to be derived from an introduction to its otherwise known as “rules.” insisted-upon absurdities. The way fat old gentlemen hunt for one particular ball, and cannot go on playing until they find it, when all the time they have a pocketful of other balls just as good, is one of those things productive of convulsing merriment, but merriment in which no one will ever join.
To rush forward and meet more than half-way a ball of a certain size in one game, while in another you hit one slightly smaller and walk miles after it, makes you feel so foolish. Any one with a mind untainted by games would think you as big an idiot as you feel yourself to be. To make all that fuss with a lot of demented-looking instruments over a simple little ball that does not care tuppence for you, is somehow not quite self-respecting. On all sides you hear people insisting that if they are to play that court must be keen or must not, that a cue must be chalked or must not, and so on and on until you feel that so many are their demands that surely a simple request on your part for a parasol or a book or a camp-stool cannot bring ill repute down on your head. This is just another proof of how little you understand the etiquette of games, and of how small a right you have to exist in close proximity to them. After many attempts there is, oddly enough, no limit to the number of times you can be taught the same game for the first time — the depressing realization comes that perhaps it would be better to give up games. A final renunciation of them will fasten upon you permanently the titles of queer and ill-natured. These are hard to bear up under, as you still secretly feel that you might have learned to like games if any one had given you half a chance; but it is better to be considered superior and unaccommodating than weak-witted, which, to be honest, was the ill-concealed opinion of all beholders when you were attempting to play. If on other grounds you are looked up to, as a human being, parent, writer, painter, or friend, if on any of these simple pleas you have come to be regarded in the community, it is not wise to jeopardize them all by your inborn inability to make a ball behave. To expose a lack considered so great, though why you will never comprehend, is a risk, almost a madness, and the avoidance of it is just one of the precautions one takes for a revered old age.
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