Page 17 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

Again, he paused. “Don’t take this the wrong way, kid, but I think we’ll get by.”

At one point that afternoon I started throwing up—excessive Sprite consumption, maybe—and when I came back to my desk to finish packing up my belongings, there was a note from Bill. I still have it. It reads:

John, I stopped by to say goodbye. Hope all goes well and you’re back here in two weeks with an appetite that would put a longshoreman to shame. Now more than ever: Watch Harvey. –Bill

For years, Bill had been bothering me to watch Harvey, and I steadfastly maintained that black-and-white movies were universally terrible, on account of how the special effects quality is poor and nothing ever happens except people talking.

I was back in Orlando, where I’d grown up. It felt like such a failure to be there, living with my parents, unable to do much of anything. I felt like I was nothing but a burden. My thoughts whorled and swirled. I couldn’t ever think straight. I couldn’t concentrate enough to read or write. I was in daily therapy, and taking a new medication, but I felt certain it wouldn’t work, because I didn’t think the problem was chemical. I thought the problem was me, at my core. I was worthless, useless, helpless, hopeless. I was less and less each day.

One night, my parents and I rented Harvey. Because it was adapted from a play, Harvey is, as I feared, a talky movie. Most of it takes place in only a few locations—the house Elwood P. Dowd shares with his older sister and his niece, the sanitarium where many believe Elwood belongs because his best friend is an invisible rabbit, and the bar where Elwood likes to hang out and drink.

Mary Chase’s dialogue is magnificent throughout, but I especially love Elwood’s soliloquies. Here is Elwood talking about chatting with strangers at the bar: “They tell me about the big, terrible things they’ve done and the wonderful things they’ll do. Their hopes, and their regrets, and their loves, and their hates. All very large, because nobody ever brings anything small into a bar.”

In another scene, Elwood tells his psychiatrist, “I’ve wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over it.”

Elwood is mentally ill. He’s not much of a contributor to society. It’d be easy to characterize him as worthless, or hopeless. But he is also extraordinarily kind, even in difficult situations. At one point, his psychiatrist says, “This sister of yours is at the bottom of a conspiracy against you. She’s trying to persuade me to lock you up. Today, she had commitment papers drawn up. She has the power of attorney over you.” Elwood replies, “My sister did all that in one afternoon. That Veta certainly is a whirlwind, isn’t she?”

Despite not being a traditional hero of any kind, Elwood is profoundly heroic. In my favorite line of the movie, he says, “Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say . . . ‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

In December of 2001, there was perhaps no human alive on Earth who needed to hear those words more than I did.

I don’t believe in epiphanies. My blinding-light awakenings always prove fleeting. But I’ll tell you this: I have never felt quite as hopeless since watching Harvey as I did just before I watched it.

A couple of months after watching Harvey, I was able to return to Chicago and to Booklist. Although my recovery was halting and often precarious, I got better. It was probably the therapy and the medication, of course, but Elwood played his part. He showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved. Elwood offered me a kind of hope that wasn’t bullshit, and in doing so helped me to see that hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness. Hope is not easy or cheap. It is true.

As Emily Dickinson put it,

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

I still sometimes stop hearing the tune. I still become enveloped by the abject pain of hopelessness. But hope is singing all the while. It’s just that again and again and again, I must relearn how to listen.

I hope you never find yourself on the floor of your kitchen. I hope you never cry in front of your boss desperate with pain. But if you do, I hope they will give you some time off and tell you what Bill told me: Now, more than ever, watch Harvey.

I give Harvey five stars.

THE YIPS

ON OCTOBER 3, 2000, a twenty-one-year-old pitcher named Rick Ankiel took the mound for the St. Louis Cardinals in the first game of a Major League Baseball playoff series. It occurs to me that you may not know the rules of baseball, but for our purposes, all you need to know is that, broadly speaking, professional pitchers throw baseballs very fast—sometimes over one hundred miles per hour—and with astonishing accuracy. Pitchers who can consistently place their throws within a few square inches of space are often said to have “good control.” Rick Ankiel had great control. He could put the ball wherever he wanted. Even when he was in high school, the professional scouts marveled at his control. They said the kid was a machine.

But about a third of the way into that playoff game in 2000, Rick Ankiel threw a very low pitch, so low that the catcher missed it—a so-called “wild pitch.” Ankiel had only thrown three wild pitches all season, but now, suddenly, he couldn’t regain his control. He threw another wild pitch, this one over the batter’s head. Then another. Another. Another. He was quickly pulled from the game.

A week later, Ankiel started another playoff game. He threw five wild pitches in twenty attempts. After that, he never consistently found the strike zone again. Ankiel won a few more games as a major league pitcher, but he couldn’t fully recover his control. He sought all kinds of medical attention, and even began drinking huge amounts of vodka during games to dull his anxiety, but his pitching never came back. He had contracted the yips. The kid, it turned out, was not a machine. Kids never are.

Rick Ankiel wasn’t the first baseball player to forget how to throw—in fact, the phenomenon is sometimes called “Steve Blass Disease” or “Steve Sax Syndrome,” after other baseball players who suffered sudden-onset throwing challenges. It’s not unique to baseball, either. In 2008, an introverted twenty-year-old tennis player named Ana Ivanovic won the French Open and became the top-ranked tennis player in the world. Commentators imagined her winning “a host of grand slams,” and maybe even becoming a formidable rival to all-time great Serena Williams.

But shortly after that French Open title, Ivanovic began to experience the yips—not when hitting the ball or swinging the racket, but when tossing the ball before serving. From footwork to swing mechanics, tennis requires precise movements and profound bodily coordination. Throwing the ball straight up in the air before serving is just about the only part of tennis that isn’t difficult. But when Ivanovic began to experience the yips, her hand would jerk mid-toss, and the ball would drift to the right, or too far forward.

Former tennis pro Pat Cash described watching Ivanovic’s serve as a “painful experience,” and it truly was, but if watching it is a painful experience, how much more painful to be the server, unable to toss the ball the way she had her entire career, ever since she first took up tennis as a five-year-old in Belgrade. You could see the torment in her eyes. Watching someone struggle with the yips is like watching a school play in which a kid forgets their line. Time stops. Attempts to disguise the discomfort—a little smile, a wave of apology—only heighten everyone’s awareness of the anguish. You know they don’t want your pity, but you offer it anyway, which only furthers the shame.

“She has absolutely no confidence in herself,” tennis great Martina Navratilova said of Ivanovic, which was no doubt true. But how could you be confident?

All serious athletes know the yips are possible, that they happen to people. But knowing something abstractly is different from knowing it experientially. Once you’ve known the yips personally, you can’t unknow them. Every time you toss a tennis ball for the rest of your life, you’ll know what could happen. How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?