Longreads

The story of my brother’s life is complicated by the fact that in my earliest memories there is no such thing as him or me. My brother was born one year and nine days after me, and although I was older, I have no recollection of life before he arrived. Growing up on a small family farm, we were alone in our play, and before the age of five it was always Dan and me together, sneaking strawberries from the garden, building snowmen in the yard until the darkness fell and our cheeks stung from the cold, whispering in our bunk beds at night. We were more than accomplices, much more even than friends; we were all the other had.

Hartley Coleridge began life with limitless promise—“all my child might be”—and ended it universally viewed as a failure. He is remembered not for his poems or his essays, though he wrote some fine ones, but for two things and two things only: he was the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and he was a disappointment. He has been called a misfit, a dreamer, a sinner, a castaway, a wayward child, a hobgoblin, a flibbertigibbet, a waif, a weird, a pariah, a prodigal, a picturesque ruin, a sensitive plant, an exquisite machine with insufficient steam, the oddest of God’s creatures, and, most frequently—by his father, his mother, his brother, and his sister; by William Wordsworth, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Thomas Carlyle; and by countless others over the years—“Poor Hartley.”

Thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.” The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb. One suspects they’d have rather gotten a new squash court.

The office park sat in a patch of desert eight miles off the Strip. I pulled the address out of my pocket. I hadn’t imagined gamblers doing business alongside divorce lawyers and accountants. In my denim miniskirt and Converse sneakers, I felt more like a teenage runaway than an interviewee. I pulled my hair out of its ponytail so that it fell over my shoulders and hid my bra straps.

It’s a minor-league mind that chooses to make sport of sports. Not that there aren’t major-league authors who do so, among them George Orwell (“Serious sport is war minus the shooting”) and H. L. Mencken (“It is impossible to imagine Goethe or Beethoven being good at billiards or golf”). Their thinking hurts the ball club. As a nation, it is through the prism of sports that we frame our ethical values, remember our history, envision our future, and find the figures of speech that create our common culture and define our national identity. Walt Whitman once whimsically described American democracy as “athletic”; history has borne out his observation in more ways than he could have foreseen.

On August 30, 1992, the Philadelphia Inquirer published an essay by David Foster Wallace now known as “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” a title Wallace apparently chose when the piece was collected in his 2005 book Consider the Lobster. In the essay, Wallace ostensibly reviews 1980s tennis juggernaut Tracy Austin’s sports memoir Beyond Center Court: My Story, and for those of you who have never read Wallace on Austin, suffice it to say he was disappointed by the book, which at one point he calls “breathtakingly insipid.”

On June 6, 1800, nearly a year into his scientific journey through South America, Alexander von Humboldt arrived at a mission on the Orinoco River called La Concepción de Uruana. It was a stunning site. The village sat at the foot of granite mountains, amidst huge pillars of stone that rose above the forest. Weeks before, Humboldt had seen mysterious etchings on the summits of such rocks—painted, the natives told him, by ancestors carried up there by the waters of a great flood.

On June 6, 1800, nearly a year into his scientific journey through South America, Alexander von Humboldt arrived at a mission on the Orinoco River called La Concepción de Uruana. It was a stunning site. The village sat at the foot of granite mountains, amidst huge pillars of stone that rose above the forest. Weeks before, Humboldt had seen mysterious etchings on the summits of such rocks—painted, the natives told him, by ancestors carried up there by the waters of a great flood.

One hundred years ago, Limburger cheese maker Jacob Andrea of Monticello, Wisconsin gave a talk to the annual meeting of the Wisconsin Cheese Makers Association. His topic was the public’s growing preference for milder, less smelly cheeses as opposed to his sharp and pungent specialty. A WCMA member offered, “I believe a little more drying would do away somewhat with the strong odor.” Andrea curtly cut that line of discussion off: “That odor is the essence of Limburger.”