1/05/2008

89 Days to Opening Day


Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 89 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today's excerpt is from Saint Augustine by Gary Wills. This is one of the books in the Peguin Lives series. These books are pocket-sized biographies of historical figures. In this passage, Wills recounts Augustine's penchant for introspection.
So, with a spelunker's hardy nerve, Augustine lowered himself into himself:
I venture over the lawns and spacious structures of memory, where treasures are stored -- all the images conveyed there by expanding, contracting, or otherwise manipulating the images; everything ticketed, here, and stored for preservation (everything that has not been blotted out, in the interval, and buried in oblivion). Some things, summoned, are instantly delivered up, though others require a longer search, to be drawn from recesses less penetrable. And, all the while, jumbled memories flirt out on their own, interrupting the search for what we want, pestering: "Wasn't it us you were seeking?" My heart strenuously waves these things off from my memory's gaze until the dim things sought arrives at last, fresh from the depths. Yet other things are brought up easily, in proper sequence, from beginning to end, and laid back in the same order, recallable at will -- which happens whenever I recite a passage by heart.
This recitation from memory is a key experience for Augustine, since it gives hime an analogy for God's creation of time out of eternity. The poem stored up in Augustine's memory has no temporal extension. It acquires that only as he sounds out its syllables, in a ong chain for a long poem, a shorter span for a short one. So the world and all its works resided in God's eternity, and only occurred in time when His Word articulated the eternal design in a sequence of a created ages.

Put today's excerpt in a baseball context.

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