On throwback day, here's a young Willa Cather defending football: "Of course it is brutal. So is Homer brutal, and Tolstoi; that is, they all alike appeal to the crude savage instincts of men. We have not outgrown all our old animal instincts yet, heaven grant we never shall!
"The moment that, as a nation, we lose brute force, or an admiration for brute force, from that moment poetry and art are forever dead among us, and we will have nothing but grammar and mathematics left...
"A good football game is an epic, it rouses the oldest part of us. Poetry is great only in that it suggests action and rouses great emotions. The world gets all its great enthusiasms and emotions from pure strains of sinew.”
What I'm telling you is that old #Huskers fan Willa Cather not only would have surely attended today's game in the cold. She would have refused hand-warmers for the principle of the matter.
