The Theater of the Impossible

The night sky over Kenmore Square shines with a strange
light that is not much less fascinating when we see high in the airthe steel poles capped with big electric lamps that radiate a
manufactured sunlight over Fenway Park, the home field of the
Boston Red Sox. We are in an immense crowd of people walking
along together as though in harmony with some secret rhythm
that sends out an odd murmur. The loud, blurred sounds of
thousands of words speak, without any language that can be
understood, about a precise excitement. We are all leaving the
same place to go together to a space that calls with a mysterious
voice understood by everyone. We have only to follow along. The sidewalk is unable to hold all of us; some must walk in the street that is crammed with cars. We don’t look particularly to see anything significant in the thousands of faces around us because the present business of walking seems so powerfully controlled by a strong desire to discover something absent rather than to seek anything in one another. The crowd has a touch of the nervous energy of buyers and sellers on the floor of a stock exchange who seem deaf to the noise of their own cries and forgetful of themselves because they have so completely surrendered their individual identity to a foreign reality indicated by fluctuating numbers on a board which seem at the same time to delight them and to torment them. But the energy of this crowd is the kind that has left for once the bewitching power of money in order to probe the veins of another kind of magic. The night sky over Fenway Park has no longer any night. We are on our way to a festival where nothing is for sale except the incorporation of ourselves in the eternal business of baseball.
Daniel McNeill
Read a complete description of the sixth game of the 1975 World Series at: usoftheworld.com/baseball
Daniel McNeill's book on the cultural meaning of baseball, "The Theater of the Impossible" is listed for sale at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall