There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignobl...e to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts....LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It's just a game--baseball--an amusement, a marginal thing, not an art, not a consequential metaphor for life, not a public trust.... It may have broken Bart Giamatti's sentimental heart, but it will never break mine.... In its behind-the-scenes machinations as sport, baseball has developed unexpected ties to big-time professional wrestling, with that strange spectacle's buffoonish, self-important, overstuffed Steinbrennerish management types spouting gibberish about the best interests of this and such and the need for moral direction, all in counterpoise to sullenly big-muscled, bad-boy superstars nattering and snuffling about not getting any respect and not being in it for the dough, and being in it for the dough.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We fell to wrestling again. We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children. He was naked and ...goatish under his robe, and I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
We laugh at him who steps out of his room at the very moment when the sun steps out, and says: "I will the sun to rise"; and at hi...m who cannot stop the wheel, and says: "I will it to roll"; and at him who is taken down in a wrestling match, and says: "I lie here, but I will that I lie here!" And yet, all laughter aside, do we ever do anything other than one of these three things when we use the expression, "I will"?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The spectacle of human beings fighting each other for whatever reason, including, at certain well-publicized times, staggering sum...s of money, is enormously disturbing because it violates a taboo of our civilization. Many men and women, however they steel themselves, cannot watch a boxing match because they cannot allow themselves to see what it is they are seeing. One thinks helplessly, This can't be happening, even as, and usually quite routinely, it is happening. In this way boxing as a public spectacle is akin to pornography: in each case the spectator is made a voyeur, distanced, yet presumably intimately involved, in an event that is not supposed to happening as it is happening. The pornographic "drama," though as fraudulent as professional wrestling, makes a claim for being about something absolutely serious, if not humanly profound: it is not so much about itself as about the violation of a taboo. That the taboo is spiritual rather than physical, or sexual--that our most valuable human experience, love, is being is being desecrated, parodied, mocked--is surely at the core of our culture's fascination with pornography.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Or on the Mat devoutly kneeling Would lift her Eyes up to the Ceiling,... And heave her Bosom unaware For neighb'ring Beaux to see it bare.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
This is rather different from the receptions I used to get fifty years ago. They threw things at me then--but they were not roses.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and, after a short season, the dismay will be overpa...st, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more brighter star shining serenely in your heaven, and blending its light with all your day.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »