What IS Healthy, Mr. Franzen?

I've joined a softball team this spring. We've had two practices now, and from each I emerge in a little more sore (the day after a our first practice I staggered around the test scoring center I'm working at, moving like an old man crossed with a gimpy zombie) and a little more interested in becoming "healthier". So, I've of course turned to the renowned health geru and budding novelist Jonathan Frazen for help. Here's what I found in his essay "Scavenging" in his 20032 essay collection How to Be Alone.

"It's healthy to adjust to reality. It's healthy, recognizing that fiction such as Proust and Faulkner is doomed, to interest yourself in the victorious technology, to fashion a niche for yourself in the new information order, to discard and then forget the values and methods of literary modernism which older readers are too distracted and demoralized to appreciate in your work and which younger readers, bred on television...are almost entirely deaf and blind to. It's healthy to stop giving yourself ulcers and migraines doing demanding work that may please a few harried peers but otherwise instills unease or outright resentment in would-be readers...Likewise healthy, almost by definition, to forget about death in order to live your life: healthy to settle for (and thereby participate in) your own marginalization as a writer, to accept as inevitable a shrinking audience, an ever-deteriorating relationship with the publishing conglomerates, a retreat into the special Protective Isolation Units that universities now provide for writers within the larger confines of their English departments..."

Jeesh. Makes me feel better about huffing and puffing after running the bases, anyway.