Via Activa

“At our best, we emulated the Review’s founder and editor, George Plimpton, who, I now see, was an exemplar of a mid-twentieth-century ideal of vigorous masculinity.”

“He was athletic enough for journalistic stunts, like playing quarterback for the Detroit Lions, boxing against Archie Moore, standing in as goalie in a hockey game, and taking a few turns on a circus trapeze, all of which he recounted in brilliantly hilarious books. His was an ethos of play—of recreation rather than training. And so he maintained a strong tennis game well into his sixties; he liked bird watching; he never took a taxi or the subway (let alone drove a car) when he could bike instead. But running or lifting weights, anything that might unduly spike the heart rate or tax the muscles, was out of the question: they would have interfered with the nightly revelry.”

“The most charming of men, George was world-famous as a host. Planeloads of people flew in from every part of the globe for the parties he threw several times a week. And when George wasn’t hosting, we—the handful of us, all in our twenties, who worked at the Review—followed him like a column of ducklings out into the Manhattan night, to book parties, benefit galas, random birthday parties, intimate soirees, movie premieres, or just to a bar to get sloshed.”

“George, however, was not just some empty bon vivant. In fact, he had an ingrained Protestant work ethic: no matter how deep into the night he dove, he always surfaced on cue, waking each morning to put in a full day of writing and editing.”

“For someone so enthralled with thought, I am, in retrospect, puzzled by my failure to reflect on the basic assumption on which my existence was based—that the mind and body sleep in separate bedrooms, leading their own lives.”

“I’ve since come to understand that the old canard about choosing between the life of the body and the life of the mind (a bastardized version of the ancient and more valid distinction between the via activa and the via contemplativa, the active, political life versus the contemplative way) sets up a false distinction. It’s a bias based on the assumption that energy expended physically must be deducted from our mental account. Contrary to what I believed in high school, jocks need not be stupid, while eggheads, to the extent that they deny their physical lives, are fools.”

“it dawned on me that the state of your body isn’t something you either choose to care about or leave be, for your body never just is—it is always either decaying or getting stronger. Not choosing is still a choice.”