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Text A In consigning manuscript to a desk drawer. I am comforted by the behavior of baseball players. There are no pitchers who do not give up home runs. There are no batters who do not strike out. There are no major league pitchers or batters who have not somehow learned to survive giving up home runs and striking out. That much is obvious. What seems to me less obvious is how these failures must be digested, or put to use, in the overall experience of the player. A jogger once explained to me that the nerves of the ankle are so sensitive and complex that each time a runner sets his food down, hundreds of messages are conveyed to the runners about the nature of the terrain and the requirements for weight distribution balance and muscle strength. I’m certain that the ninth-inning home run that Dave Henderson hit off Donny Moore registered complexly and permanently in Moore’s mind and body and that the next time Moore faced Henderson. His pinching was informed by his awful experience of October 1986 Moore continuing baseball career depended to some extent on his converting that encounter with Henderson into something useful for his pinching I can also imagine such an experience destroying an athlete, registering in his mind and body in such a negative way as to produce a debilitating fear. Of the many ways in which athletes and artists are similar. One is that, unlike accountants or plumber or insurance salesman, to succeed at all they must perform at an extraordinary level of excellence. Another is that they must be willing to extend themselves irrationally in order to achieve that level of performance. A writer does not have to write all-out all the time, but he or she must be ready to write all-out any time the story requires it. Hold back and you produce what just about any literate citizen can produce, a pretty-good piece of work like the cautious pitcher, the timid writer can spend a lifetime in the minor leagues. And what more than failure the strike out, the crucial homerun given up, the manuscript criticized aid rejected-is more likely to produce caution or timidity? An instinctive response to painful experience it to avoid the behavior that produced the pain. To function at the level of excellence required for survival, writers, like athletes, must go against instinct, must absorb their failures and become stronger, must endlessly repeat the behavior that produced the pain. Text B The athletic advantages of this concentration, particularly for an athlete who was making up for the absence of great natural skill were considerable. Concentration gave you an edge over many of your opponents. Even your better, who could not isolate themselves to that degree. For example, in football if they were ahead (or behind) by several touchdowns. If the game itself seemed to have been settled, they tended to slack off, to ease a little, certainly to relax their own concentration. It was then that your own unwavering concentration and your own indifference to the larger point of view paid off. At the very least you could deal out surprise and discomfort to your opponents. It was more that. Do you see the rituals of physical concentration, of acute engagement in a small space while disregarding all the clamor and demands of the larger world, was the best possible lesson in precisely the kind of selfish intensity needed to create and to finish a poem a story, or a novels. this alone mastered while all the world going on with and without you, did not. I was leaning first in muscle, blood, and bone, not from literature and not from teachers of literature or the arts or the natural sciences, but from coaches, in particular this one coach who paid me enough attention to influence me to teach some things to myself. I was learning about art and life through the abstraction of athletics in much the same way that a soldier is. To an extent, prepared for war by endless parade ground drill. His body must learn to be soldier before heart, mind, and spirit can. Ironically, I lend to dismiss comparisons of athletics to art and to the creative process but only because, I think, so much that is claimed for both is untrue. But I have come to believe-indeed. I have to believe it in so far as I believe in the validity and efficacy of art that what comes to us first and foremost through the body, as a sensuous affective experience, is taken and transformed by mind and self into a thing of the spirit which is only to say that what the body learns and is taught is of enormous significance-at least until the last light of the body fails. 11. Why does the writer of text A consign the manuscript to a desk drawer? a. to protect it from the inquisitive eyes of his family b. to prevent its getting lost disordered c. because his publisher wishes to take another look at it. d. because he chooses to watch a televised baseball game e. to set it aside as unremarkable in its current state

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