The Green Revolution Read Free

commotion surrounding him than an essay of F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Crack-Up that had made him aware of Princeton football.
    Scarcely more than twenty years old when he had been dubbed a doctor of philosophy—in philosophy—he had long failed to find an academic berth because of his massive size and eccentric personality and then became almost inadvertently a partner in Philip’s private investigation firm. During all those years his involvement in the fortunes of college football had been merely a matter of paying intermittent attention to Philip, who gave running comments on televised games and listened to the endless chatter about them by experts before, during, and after the contest. Engrossed in a book or busy at his computer, keeping up his contacts around the globe with correspondents sharing one or more of his many interests, Roger experienced the crescendo and decrescendo from the television room as merely a pleasant background noise. Then he had been offered a job at Notre Dame.
    It would be too much to say that it was Philip who had accepted the offer, but his enthusiasm at the possibility of relocating in South Bend, with the prospect of all those teams to watch close up—his uncontrolled delight, in fact—would have been sufficient to overcome Roger’s own predilection for inertia. The offer had been made on the basis of Roger’s monograph on Baron Corvo, a legendary nineteenth-century convert, pervert, novelist, and eventual Venetian gondolier who continues to fascinate many. Roger would be an endowed distinguished professor floating free of any departmental involvement; he could teach what the spirit moved him to teach. His intention was to acquaint his students with forgotten elements of Catholic culture, writers, poets, architects, anything but musicians, the latter precluded by his tin ear.
    In the fall of 2007, he was offering a course on Catholic involvement in the revival of interest in the liberal arts, and the concomitant rise of interest in the great books of the Western tradition, that had taken place in the 1930s. In this he was aided greatly by having as his friend Otto Bird, the founder of what was now called the Program of Liberal Studies. Otto had known personally many of the pivotal figures in that revival, and he had worked with Mortimer Adler at the Encyclopedia Britannica, editing the Great Books of the Western World in each volume of which he himself published a lengthy, impressive essay on one of those great books. To Roger’s wondrous delight, two of those essays had been thorough yet compact studies of Aquinas’s Summa theologiae and Dante’s Divina Commedia. As it happened, Otto was visiting Roger when the 2007 season began its slow descent.
    There were philosophical fans who could take comfort in the adage that you win some, you lose some. Philip Knight was not among them. There were fans who attributed misfortune on the field to biased officials, probably in the pay of the National Council of Churches. Philip was not among them either, although he sometimes sympathized with the sentiment. The group that included Philip looked beyond an undeniable defeat to the golden prospects of the next weekend when all would be made right, much as, until the eighth race is run, losing gamblers summon hope and throw good money after bad. It was precisely this eternally rising hope that proved to be all too temporary as the tragic season unfolded. And soon would come the games that even pessimists expected the Irish to win.
    The sardonic billed it as the battle of the titans. Navy had not beaten Notre Dame since the days of the immortal Roger Staubach. Their 2007 season equaled that of Notre Dame in pathos, though less had been expected of the team from Annapolis. The bruised and battered Notre Dame fan felt, not without reason, that here at last, however equivocally and against a lesser opponent, something like redemption must come. Not even the prescient