Henry James' Guide to Sports

It is the singular endemic aspect of America, and surely the most illuminating quality of all our newly illuminating qualities—for when on earth have the lights of human effort shone brighter?—that one is sheered from one’s past, voluntarily or by conscription, as yet the moth has no choice but to arrive at its eventual commencement, whether or not it ever dreamt of spreading wings. What, then, thinks the butterfly of its departed curtain, and all the memories and sins held within, indeed one with, that old skin? To be free of our pasts, need we lose them entirely?

So Matt Ryan and his Falcons have soared twice before, only to find that the sky is also a ceiling: two attempts to fly, two falls to earth. Must they think their wings decoration only? Or do those feathered arms project, in the rush of the fall, the roaring winds of victory? That succor was all too well tasted by Eli Manning and his Giants, for they, lumbering beasts though they may be, once climbed clumsily up rocky cliffs to greater heights than those birds have attained. These Giants indeed ought to feel a congruence of supernal proportions as their current ascent does quite mirror their former one; and they may only hope that, in tracing their past glory, they are adding to it, and not forming in their current state a parody of their previous one. For as the Falcons must crave the past, to take from it the determination that is the fermented product of the poison of bitter defeat, so must the Giants pray for the past as well, to feel in it the shape of a victory they need only replicate.

But this is first and foremost a new world, one that leapt oceans to leave the old gate-and-gargoyle edifices to those ghosts who built them and must harbor in them forever. It is our curse and our destiny that we on the just-discovered continent have not yet tired of the discovery—indeed, much as old Europe must always be old, their lot to be trapped within the stony permanence to which they once so strove, so too must America be always new, always renewing, always striving over new seas. Thus will the Giants and the Falcons look to the past this Sunday only to discover that it is quite beyond their sight, across a great pond, protecting them in no way against the undiscovered country of the next game.

Henry James’ Pick: Atlanta Falcons