By Tony Wright
The footy season can’t come too soon.
It’s not simply because donning a scarf and joining the queue to a match – or settling back and warming the TV at home – are deeply pleasurable autumn-to-springtime rituals.
Collingwood and Carlton fans head to the MCG.Credit: Wayne Taylor
This year the footy feels necessary. More than a diversion. Sanctuary.
Has anyone else begun finding something pressing to do – a stroll in the park, a long phone call – when the evening TV news approaches?
I have spent more than half a century consuming and writing for newspapers (and latterly, websites), looking forward to the evening news and current affairs shows.
There was a time when I leapt on planes and rushed towards some of the more extreme horrors the world could dish up. Couldn’t get enough of reality.
Why then, might I – and a lot of my friends – yearn now to turn away from current events and bury ourselves deep in the approaching footy season?
The affairs of the world have become so filled with anger, so confounding, so irrational, that they have become gruelling to digest.
Waiting for footy to offer merciful relief, I have taken to seeking out books from another time and escaping into their pages when the day’s work is done.
Through recent nights, Henry Miller’s classic, The Colossus of Maroussi, has transported me almost 90 years back to the Instagram-free sybaritic pleasures of Greece and its islands, from Corfu to Hydra.
Miller describes in a sort of extended ecstasy his nine-month odyssey to Greece in 1939 as World War II began consuming Europe.
Having abandoned his long-time home in Paris ahead of the arrival of the book-burning Nazis, he travelled to Corfu to stay with friends – the English expatriate poet and novelist, Lawrence Durrell, and his wife Nancy.
There, Miller tried to put out of his mind the gathering mad catastrophe of a world war. He immersed himself in the overwhelming beauty and joyful character of Greece, its larger-than-life inhabitants and its ancient wonders.
Like many readers before me, I was struck by a paragraph in the book that might be characterised as the ideal prescription for escape from a world otherwise in turmoil.
Miller describes lying in the sunshine on a beach for hours “doing nothing, thinking nothing … like Robinson Crusoe of the island of Tobago”.
“To be silent the whole day long, see no newspaper, hear no radio, listen to no gossip, be thoroughly and completely lazy, thoroughly and completely indifferent to the fate of the world, is the finest medicine a man can give himself,” he wrote.
Not many of us can manage anything quite so blissful, of course, let alone for months at a time on the beaches of the eastern Mediterranean.
Life and its responsibilities tend to get in the way. Anyway, my editors and business managers wouldn’t be entirely happy with the promotion of the idea that the finest medicine involves complete laziness, and seeing no newspaper or hearing no radio.
Still, Miller’s formula – even in small doses tailored to what might be achievable in less indulgent surrounds than the sun-blessed inlets of Corfu – has much to recommend it for times like these.
When a modern US would-be emperor is employing wicked lies to upend the geopolitical order in favour of his friend, a Russian despot, all the while granting his chosen thugs the power to indulge their wildest, most vengeful conspiracy fantasies in the name of that refuge of charlatans – patriotism – it doesn’t seem too unreasonable, from time to time, to seek the shelter of a state of indifference.
The more febrile conservatives, of course, like to characterise those who recoil from the vulgarian and his henchmen as suffering “Trump Derangement Syndrome”, apparently considering it an amusing form of comeuppance.
Perhaps they have something there. Derangement feels the order of our times.
It is curious, however, that those wielding the harebrained phrase are effectively turning it upon themselves, for they, too, are accusing those who disagree with them of insanity. Circular logic?
Miller’s seductive literary advice to ignore everything might, of course, risk the criticism that it is the way of the coward.
The world of 1939 was in such turmoil it would lead over the next five years to the deaths of an estimated 15 million military combatants and 38 million civilians; and there he was, idling away on a beach.
Henry MillerCredit: The Age
But even if he had guessed that such a disaster would engulf humanity, what could he have done about it? Aged 48 that year, he was neither soldier nor politician.
Today, we might ask, what can you or I do about the unpredictable chaos threatening the Western alliance?
Miller’s idyll ended when, with the war advancing and fears that Italy was to invade Greece, the American consulate in Athens invalidated his passport and ordered him to sail for America.
There, he found he’d lost his taste for his home country.
He took a very long road trip, found the US of the 1940s cruel and sterile, wrote a book called The Air-Conditioned Nightmare and declared that “nowhere have I encountered such a dull, monotonous fabric of life as here in America”.
Joe McCarthy, left, presides at a hearing of the Senate Investigations Subcommittee, in Washington in 1954, with committee counsel Roy Cohn.Credit: AP
When The Air-Conditioned Nightmare finally found a publisher in 1945, it copped poor reviews, partly because it was deemed by America’s conservatives at the time as lacking in patriotism.
By the time senator Joe McCarthy’s witch-hunting (a cyclical activity in American history) had set fear into the lives of writers, artists and others accused of Un-American activities in the early 1950s, Miller had found a new Utopian sanctuary in which to remain indifferent to the state of the world – high above the ocean at Big Sur, south of San Francisco.
McCarthy didn’t come at Miller, possibly because he knew nothing of him – his books were banned from entering the US from 1938 to 1961.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Today, books are once again being removed from America’s shelves.
Bring on the footy. Call it sanctuary.
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