5/28/2023 0 Comments Sidd finchYes, one must suspend disbelief to keep score in the midst of George Plimpton's baseball fable, much as we were asked to do by Bernard Malamud in The Natural, though perhaps to a lesser degree than is necessary with the story of Roy Hobbs. Oh, and Sidd is a master of the French Horn & wears only one boot when pitching, with the other foot bare. It seems that with meditation, concentration & contemplation of mind & soul on a certain objective, Sidd has learned to throw a baseball 165 MPH with absolute accuracy at a target, breathing to produce inner heat & clear lungs while inhaling 5 wisdoms. While living at Harvard & living in Cambridge, Sidd attended a baseball game at Fenway Park & he has come to view a baseball diamond as a modified mandala. Temple is in the midst of a long period of convalescence, spending a great deal of time exploring his consciousness, said to be time "between the dog & the wolf", also seen as "a master plan of idleness, a cocoon of darkness."Īt this point, who should appear in his life but Sidd Finch, having fled a brief stint at Harvard following graduation from his elite British boarding school, also seemingly in a kind of limbo after his father's death, when he had spent time in Nepal, Bhutan & Tibet, living as a disciple of the great 11th century Buddhist poet-saint Lama Milarepa, "learning to achieve a parallelism of thought & movement, an astonishing rhythm that gathers a tremendous amount of cosmic force." What I'd forgotten is the context for how Plimpton in expanding the magazine story into a novel embedded the story of Sidd Finch within that of the man who narrates the tale, Robert Temple, a stand-in for the author, who in the book is suffering from Post Traumatic Shock, following many helicopter missions, referred to as "joy-pops", during his time in Vietnam. But a global pandemic can cause one to look backward, turning to books long postponed from being read & such was the case with George Plimpton's The Curious Case of Sidd Finch.įor starters, Hayden Sydney-White Finch was an orphan, adopted by a wealthy British family, with his father a rather well-regarded anthropologist dying in a plane crash in Nepal where he'd been doing research & his mother in a freak accident in the same country. ![]() It has lingered unread on a shelf with other baseball books I'd read ever since. When the novel appeared somewhat later, expanding the story & by the publishing company I worked for, I got a copy. ![]() At a time when I followed sports & especially baseball a bit more thoroughly, I remember the famous article detailing the mysterious Sidd Finch in Sports-Illustrated 35 years ago, the April Fool's Day cover story as it turned out.
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