Read Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) for Free Online Page B

therefore: (3) I have just seen something that is at the same time both human and more than human; I have just seen something like the human ideal made visible.
    What I would want to note in this set of responses is the way in which envy first raises its head and is then extinguished. One starts by envying Federer, one moves from there to admiring him, and one ends up neither envying nor admiring him but exalted at the revelation of what a human being—a being like oneself—can do.
    Which, I find, is very much like my response to masterworks of art on which I have spent a lot of time (reflection, analysis), to the point where I have a good idea of what went into their making: I can see how it was done, but I could never have done it myself, it is beyond me; yet it was done by a man (now and again a woman) like me; what an honor to belong to the species that he (occasionally she) exemplifies!
    And at that point I can no longer distinguish the ethical from the aesthetic.
    As a footnote to my comments on the present banking crisis, may I quote a comment by George Soros that I came across? “The salient feature of the current financial crisis is that it was not caused by some external shock. . . . The crisis was generated by the system itself.” Dimly Soros recognizes that nothing has really happened—the only things that have changed are the numbers.
All good wishes,
John

Brooklyn
    March 16, 2009
    Dear John,
    In light of your quotation from George Soros, these sentences from the galleys of a book I received the other day, written by a professor friend, Mark C. Taylor, to be published by Columbia University Press: “Since the late 1970s a new form of capitalism has emerged—finance capitalism. In previous forms of capitalism (i.e., industrial and consumer capitalism), people made money by buying and selling labor or material objects. In finance capitalism, by contrast, wealth is created by circulating signs, backed by nothing but other signs, in a regression that for practical purposes is limitless. Financial markets have become a sophisticated confidence game, and the people at the helm are latter-day versions of Melville’s wily Confidence Man. . . .”
    •
    A new twist in the Beckett Chronicle that might amuse you. A couple of weeks ago I received an invitation to attend a new literary festival to be held just outside Dublin in September and to give—imagine this—the first annual Samuel Beckett Address. I tortured myself about it for several days and then finally agreed to accept the invitation. I hope I haven’t made a terrible mistake. I wish, somehow, that we could do it in tandem.
    On the subject, I bought a copy of the first volume of Beckett’s letters last week and have been poking around in it with a kind of gloomy fascination. Never have I seen a book of correspondence with such a heavy, cumbersome apparatus. I now understand your doubts and confusions when you were asked to review it. The distinction between “work” and “life” has created a volume in which too much is missing, and I feel frustrated by it and at times (I confess) rather bored. I’m looking forward to reading your piece.
    •
    We can leave sports behind if you wish, although I was planning to go on at great length about the second part of the question (participating in sports rather than watching others play them): the pleasures of competition, the intense focus required that at times enables you to transcend the strictures of your own consciousness, the concept of belonging to a team, the necessity of coping with failure, and numerous other topics. At some later point, perhaps, I will sit down and try to write that letter, even if we are in the midst of something else. It’s a subject that still interests me a great deal.
    As for the exaltation you talk about when watching Federer in his glory days, I am in total accord with you. Awe at the fact that a fellow human being is accomplishing such things, that we (as a species)