But I was raised Catholic, and the one part of that upbringing I embraced more than anything was the guilt. The word "guilty" in "guilty pleasure" is for me only mostly a joke. When I take the 2 1/2 - 3 hours to watch a hockey game, or spend my mornings reading over the hockey news, I can't help but feel like I'm "wasting" time when I should be doing something more productive or meaningful--reading, grading, preparing for class, researching my next project, etc. Part of this is just what it means to be an academic (we get a lot of "free" time--that is, time when we aren't required to be in a specific place engaging in a specific task--but that's also our work time; eventually we start to feel like all "free" time should be spent working). But part of it is also a sense that hockey isn't a "worthy" thing to spend time on--that it's ultimately meaningless, or, even worse, actually pernicious, a vehicle for corporate agendas and militaristic ideologies. And when we're talking about the NHL, where minimum wage is $500k and players are paid as much as $10 million a year (I'm looking at you, Kovalchuk), it's hard not to say that the league represents, or is at least a part of, what the 99% are protesting against--rightly--right now in cities across the world. This isn't something I can defend--it's not something I should try to defend. And I can't deny that I'd probably get more work done if I watched less hockey. It is thus a source of guilt.
But I also think that there's something to be said for loving something--pretty much anything--intensely without regard for whether it has some larger meaning. Recently, I was rereading C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters for a course I'm teaching, and I came across this passage:
The man who truly and disinterestedly enjoys any one thing in the world, for its own sake, and without caring two-pence what other people say about it, is by that very fact fore-armed against some of our subtlest modes of attack.
The speaker here is Screwtape, a demon, who is instructing his nephew how best to corrupt human souls. I don't believe in the devil, but I do believe in what the devil means. Part of human good has to be our capacity for enjoyment, for love, for appreciation. And that, it seems to me, must mean that there is something inherently worthwhile in acts of pure enjoyment, regardless of the significance of the thing being enjoyed. To paraphrase (and take a couple of liberties with) Oscar Wilde, if we are going to care about something useless, then we should care about it intensely. It is maybe the pleasure I take in watching hockey that can redeem the guilt.
So this blog is my confession. In part, I mean this in the Catholic sense--to confess is to seek absolution, relief from guilt. But I also mean this word in its older sense. The Latin root of "confess" is the verb fateri--to acknowledge, own, or manifest. This is a particular kind of speech that doesn't just communicate but declares, in order to transform what is declared from an inner reality into a reality in the world at large. To confess my love of hockey here means to intensify it, to make it more real, to "own" it. Instead of spending less time on this "meaningless" pursuit, I'm going to spend more, and see what happens. I want to see if a labor of love can turn a "guilty pleasure" into a different kind of pleasure, and to see if loving a thing enough can make that thing worth loving.
This blog is part thought-experiment, part love-letter to the most irrational love I have in life.
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