When Dante reaches his ultimate destination, he likens the dwelling place of the blessed spirits to a “celestial rose.” In the petals he sees all the blessed souls who have earned salvation arranged in rows, ranks, and sections, acording to their gender, the historical period when they lived, and the measure of divine grace granted to each. Not all go on to read the second canticle, Purgatorio,and even fewer get to the third, Paradiso. Similarly, of those who read the Divine Comedy many read only Inferno. In baseball few of the batters who get on base manage to advance beyond first. Finding himself lost in a dark wood, Dante sets off–with Virgil and then Beatrice as his first- and third-base “coaches”–on a voyage that will take him first through the circles of Hell (first base), then the slopes of Purgatory (second base), and then the planetary and starry spheres of Paradise (third base), all the way to the Empyrean (home plate), where the souls that have achieved salvation dwell in the presence of God.Ĭuriously, Inferno, the first canticle of the poem, like first base, is where people get stranded on the homeward journey. Throngs of worshippers (spectators, fans) participate vicariously while members of a revered priestly class (players, coaches, and umpires) re-enact the story of humanity’s exile from Eden and the perennial longing to return there: to make it all the way around back to home base.Ĭircling the bases-itself an expression redolent of another perennial quixotic human quest: that of squaring the circle or inversely in this case, circling the square: the bases forming a square, or diamond, that the base runner circles–and reaching home constitutes a journey analogous to the one that Dante undertakes in his Divine Comedy. Within that symbolic space a ritual is routinely performed. In the middle of of our industrialized cities, surrounded by concrete, metal, and plastic structures, baseball parks enclose a green field, a vestigial “paradise” in the original Persian sense of the word. In the Greek of the New Testament, it became paradeisos, and subsequently in Late Latin, paradisus, by which time it came to refer to what we now also call Heaven (pp.20-22). In an earlier book, from his time as a professor of literature, The Earthly Paradise and the Renaissance Epic (1966), Giamatti pointed out that the word “paradise” derives from a Persian word, pairidaeza, that referred to a royal park enclosed by a wall. of going home after having left home, the story of how difficult it is to find the origins one so deeply needs to find” (p. Bartlett Giamatti in Take Time for Paradise (1989): “It is the story.
So pointed out literary scholar, then President of Yale University, then Baseball Commissioner, A. It acts out our desire to make our way back home, to get back to the Garden of Eden.
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