Read Online Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville by Stephen Jay Gould - Free Book Online

emotion.
    This time, on a crisp and sunny day, I walked to the parade—and immediately recognized why these celebrations must be held at the very southern end of Broadway, on an ordinary working day when kids can miss school (and not on the more convenient weekend for televisors and traffic controllers).
    This rule of time and place must be observed because ticker-tape parades stand out (and move along) as one of the few unaltered joys of our past, still vibrant enough to face the present and future in uncompromised form. “See, the conquering hero comes”—and the entire city may watch and celebrate as the procession moves up the full length of main street, and everyone walks to the event from home. The surrounding buildings must be alive with workaday activity, so that shredded computer paper (substituting for the genuine ticker tape of yore) can cascade from all the windows, propelled by real human hands.
     

    New York Yankees World Series victory parade, October 23, 1998. Credit: AP/Wide World Photos
     
    I was still in Boston during the 1996 victory and celebration. I even missed the final game of the World Series because, during those very hours, I was singing in a performance of Handel’s oratorio on Milton’s text “L’Allegro ed il Penseroso.” At one point in the performance, no doubt as the Yankees scored the winning run, the tenor soloist intoned Milton’s lines about vibrant and visceral joy:
    Come and trip it as you go
    On the light fantastic toe.
    Another childhood misconception, finally resolved: “light” and “fantastic” are both adjectives!
    Yes, Joe, Scott, David, Derek, Mariano, Paul, Tino, Andy, Chuck, Bernie (please stay, you’ll never find a better team), El Duque, and all you others down to the very last and entirely essential man. Yes, especially, Darryl. And yes, even George. We’ll trip the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

Fenway Crowns the Millennium
    A s performers in daily life, each of us can honor the best in our common human nature when we do justly, love mercy, and walk humbly. But as spectators of great accomplishments, we thrill to the transcendent moment of peak achievement in any honorable skill.
    These rare and wondrous incidents—for we can only hope to witness a precious few in a full lifetime—unfold in two distinctly different modes. One is essentially democratic. Any good player—although odds favor the best, of course—can propagate a glorious moment of victory if circumstances conspire and skills permit: Carlton Fisk’s great home run in the 1975 World Series, or Ted Williams’s last hurrah, when he hit a dinger in his final at bat, to cite two local examples.
     
    First published as “Greatness at Fenway” in the Boston Globe , July 16, 1999.
     
    But the second mode is elite. We may, on the rarest of occasions, enjoy the privilege of watching a person who can do something so much better than anyone else on the planet that we have to wonder if he really belongs to our universal tribe of Homo sapiens . I can cite only two such experiences in my previous fifty-seven years of life, both musical: when, in the late 1960s, I heard Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau sing Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin , and even his triple pianissimos penetrated like pinpricks of utter beauty to my seat in the last row of the last balcony of Symphony Hall; and when, two years ago at the Metropolitan Opera, I saw the world’s greatest performers in each part boost their combined talents far above the sum of their individual strengths when they sang the first act of Wagner’s Die Walküre : Placido Domingo as Siegmund, Deborah Voigt as Sieglinde, and Matti Salminen as Hunding, with James Levine conducting the finest orchestra ever assembled in operatic history.
    In Boston, we have just been treated to a fabulous doubleheader of similar import as the millennium closes on our shrine of Fenway Park—and I shall never forget the thrill and privilege of simply being