OPINION | PHILIP MARTIN: Let us persist

We rewatched the 1979 film "North Dallas Forty" the other night.

It holds up pretty well in most respects. Its critique of professional sports in general and of the National Football League in particular feels prescient and acute, and Nick Nolte's performance (in a role where the screenwriters did very little to help him out) is beautifully calibrated. It catches something of the pretentious machismo of professional sports.

There's one scene I'd supressed--a better word than "forgotten" in this case--where a coach (played by Charles Durning) recites a poem to his team that is meant to underscore the importance of winning. It includes these lines:

The rewards to his warriors are many.

The rewards to the losers, disgrace.

Some say winning's not everything, that competition has a limited place.

But if that cowardly slogan is true, why did God name this the human race?

Groan. The poem is purposefully bad, written specifically for the movie--it doesn't appear in the 1973 novel by former Dallas Cowboy Peter Gent. (The book is even darker than the film and covers a lot more than the hypocrisy inherent in professional football.) In the movie, the poem is a comedic device--it's so bad that even the most meathead of the players recognize that it's tripe.

That several of them end up expressing admiration for the poem and requesting copies adds a layer of irony, suggesting a disconnect between the coach's rhetoric and their genuine feeling about the game--which isn't a game at all but a cutthroat business, one in which it makes sense to suck up to the idiot coach using bad poetry as a motivational tool.

It also rings true; I had a football coach who was sweet on the poem "Invictus" by William Ernest Henley.

Lots of people--in my experience, mostly men--are fond of Henley's poem, which has a defiant tone. You probably know it even if you think you don't, it's the one that ends: I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

Coach would pull out "Invictus" once or twice a season, imagining, I guess, that it inspired us. We could be "bloody, but unbowed." He obviously loved that poem, which he thought was about strength, grit and refusing to yield in the face of adversity.

Most of us seventh- and eight-graders rolled our eyes at this. Even then, I thought the speaker was a little full of himself and that his bravado felt thin and empty. You can scream all you want at the Mack truck, buddy, it's still going to flatten you before it notices you.

Maybe I didn't have the language for it then, but I instinctively understood strength isn't about standing tall in every storm. Sometimes, it's about crawling from the wreckage, battered and broken, and learning to live with what's left.

My feelings haven't changed much. "Invictus" is a preposterous poem, somewhat redeemed by a good beat. The idea that the human spirit can endure anything, that we are untouchable captains of our own fate, is both arrogant and blind to the fragility of life. It implies that those who don't survive didn't want it bad enough, that losing is a failure of character.

I think losing is inevitable, and there is value in it. We learn more from it than we do from winning. But it's not virtue or moral tenacity that divides us into winners and losers; most often it is luck. We get what we get, not what we deserve, and the truest test is what we make of it.

One of the stupider things anyone ever said is "What doesn't kill you makes you stronger." Attributed to

Friedrich Nietzsche, the phrase has been stripped of its philosophical depth and is used as a motivational bumper sticker, a platitude for adversity. In his original context in "Twilight of the Idols" (1888), Nietzsche was not offering a simplistic pep talk. He wasn't peddling platitudes for locker rooms or Instagram captions. He was exploring his concept of the "will to power," the inner force that drives humans to overcome limitations, transform hardship, and grow. He spoke in hyperbole, not naivete.

To get stronger, you need resistance--most of us might concede Nietzsche that point. But there are plenty of things short of death that can leave you broken, enfeebled, or irreparably changed. Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is real. The human spirit can be resilient, but it is not invincible. You can captain your own soul perhaps, but you have to accept fate.

That's why they call it fate.

One of the things I try to stress in these columns is how lucky I am to be here. We all are, all of us are the product of thousands of miracles, none of which had that much to do with us. We can take credit for some things, we can choose to invest in bitcoin or learn to play the piano, but not for the circumstances of our birth or the advantages we've enjoyed.

The world has always given its denizens reason to worry. Worry is always appropriate. Our planet is changing; there are grand shifts coming. In geopolitics, as with weather, nothing ever stays the same. Often it seems, to paraphrase Christopher Hitchens, that the world is at war, with everything we love pitted against everything we despise.

Poet John Berryman once said an artist was always lucky when "presented with the worst possible ordeal which will not actually kill him. At that point, he's in business."

This is not exactly the same thing as sub-Nietzschean bluster, but it is close. And it is also true. Trauma begets good art. We at least have that.

Not that trauma is primarily a creative resource; it's mostly a fire to walk through, a storm to survive. What we make of it--if we have the capacity, the support, and the luck to make anything at all--isn't always a heroic transformation. Usually, it's just finding a way to live with the scars and the residual sadness. If we can.

Hardship doesn't exist to mold us into stronger, more resilient beings, though sometimes it does just that. Sometimes, though, we're left broken, and the only victory we can claim is persistence-- the slow, messy work of piecing ourselves back together. It doesn't make for a stirring locker-room speech, but it's honest--and there's strength in that honesty, too.

Let us persist.

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