STUNNING Theses on the Philosophy of Test Cricket. The Essay I wish I had written, left me speechless, gasping for breath --
"The good news is that, for digital immigrants - people who grew up without these stimuli - a few weeks away will allow the brain to return to normal. But digital natives - those who've always known the internet and smartphones - might be forever different. Before the age of 20, there's a significant amount of pruning of the synapses. The generation coming of age now might have permanently changed its brains. Studies show humans are losing some ability to interpret facial cues. What's next? Will people one day be unable to read a novel? Or, say, watch a five-day sporting event?
"When the clock was invented, there was no minute hand. Nobody really needed minutes until around 1700. The modern wristwatch was invented in about 1820. What happened in between? The Industrial Revolution. For the first time in history, people needed to be at work on time. Minutes mattered. Now seconds matter. So we check our email every few moments, even feeling phantom vibrations in our pocket - like pain in an amputated limb - wondering what we're missing, even as we're doing something we profess to love.
"In the first cricket book ever printed, he tells me, the author was already lamenting things that had been lost...'This goes back a long time. And now it takes the form of: will Test cricket survive? There's this anxiety about losing that link with the past. And the anxiety is greater than the actual threat. It's very English, that anxiety. It has to do with the English experience of modernity and paradox. This was the first modern nation. And precisely because of that, there are a number of emotional attachments to the pre-modern.'
"Bowling a cricket ball and the invention of the spinning jenny, the machine that ushered in the Industrial Revolution, happened at the same time. So much changed so quickly, and cricket becoming the national sport was a response to that change. In a world where time suddenly governed lives, sportsmen played a game that lasted five days. The game was dying from the moment it was born. In some ways, it was created to die, a symbolic martyr for a world crushed by the minute hand.
"The game was an island of pre-Industrial England. Even people who disagree about almost everything else can agree on this: if Test cricket is threatened, so too is our collective depth... When Marqusee describes the pleasure of attending a Test match, he lingers on the way he's able to think. In the white spaces. I think about the silence at Lord's, and I understand. Test cricket is different from the rest of the world because it was designed to be.
"I like the idea I can go to a sporting match and bring my own mood," Marqusee says, "and not have it spoon-fed moment by moment. The mood isn't pre-determined or pre-packaged. You create the mood. It almost means cricket requires complex meanings because there is more interacting with the spectator's mind. That horrifies the professional entertainment industry. You know, dead air. But it's freedom for the spectator. Not everything is being pushed on us. We get the chance to let our minds free. It's not demanding. It's not shrill. It's meditative."
http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/549101.html
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