Life Is Hard summary

There’s no doubt that loneliness hurts. Functional MRIs show that the area of the brain triggered by social rejection is the same area that’s triggered by physical pain. To understand why loneliness hurts, let’s take a closer look at friendship through the eyes of two heavyweight philosophers.

In one corner we have Aristotle, who wrote that without friends, there’s no reason to live. Two of the ten books in his Nicomachean Ethics are devoted to friendship. The Greek great believed that friendships are based on the virtues of the friend. Those with the most virtues – like being good at your job, or being honest or funny – have the most friends.

Maybe you’ve heard about the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. If you have, forget them. Grief doesn’t appear in predictable steps. Instead, it comes in scattered waves that can change from day to day and person to person.

The chaotic nature of grief is illustrated by The Unfortunates, written by the experimental British novelist B. S. Johnson. It was published in 1969, four years before Johnson died by suicide at the age of 40. The book is narrated by a journalist covering a soccer match in a city that triggers memories of a dead friend. Here’s the experimental part – the novel consists of 27 booklets in a box that can be read in any order, except for “First” and “Last.” Johnson is warning readers that grief doesn’t have a straight story line. It can twist and turn in unexpected directions every time it’s opened.

Failure creeps into our lives every day – making wrong turns, losing clients, forgetting anniversaries. But failure is most glaring, and memorable, in the world of sports. Baseball errors that cost their teams championships have earned lasting nicknames like “Merkle’s Boner” and the “Snodgrass Muff.” A near century of Red Sox failure begat the “Curse of the Bambino” in Boston. And Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca was branded a failure when he gave up the “Shot Heard ’Round the World” – a home run to Bobby Thomson that sent the New York Giants to the 1951 World Series.

That famous home run and the men associated with it are the subject of Joshua Prager’s The Echoing Green. Prager reminds us there is more to Branca’s life than that one failing moment – just like there’s more to Thomson’s life. He writes about Branca’s large and loving family, and Thomson’s ambivalent father. Prager structures the book so the personal details interrupt the baseball details in odd places and jarring moments. It’s another way of reminding us that lives and people are defined by a jumbled multitude of events, not just one.