As I mentioned in a previous post, we are developing a new path of collecting at the Watkinson, in honor of Trinity’s amazing success over more than a decade of playing squash. We acquired this 33-item collection from a Vermonter with a deep love of the game and its traditions and lore.

It is our hope that some of the student athletes who play the sport will think of us the next time they have to do a paper, and learn a bit about the history of the sport in which they are participating, and to which they ultimately contribute.

In 1919 T. S. Eliot wrote the following in an essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent: “. . . if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should be positively dismissed. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense […] and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence.”

This concept of the labor involved, both physical and mental, in order to take part in a tradition, is essential to understand when you come to the Watkinson.  We have, after all, over 5 miles of shelves holding a portion of the concentrated traditions of five centuries of human endeavor.  Play the game so your mind and muscles may know it–come to the Watkinson to engage with these materials for a more sublime understanding of the game.