A. Bartlett Giamatti Quotes

The gods have fled, I know. My sense is the gods have always been essentially absent. I do not believe human beings have played games or sports from the beginning merely to summon or to please or to appease the gods. If anthropologists and historians believe that, it is because they believe whatever they have been able to recover about what humankind told the gods humankind was doing. I believe we have played games, and watched games, to imitate the gods, to become godlike in our worship of eachother and, through those moments of transmutation, to know for an instant what the gods know.

Sports represent a shared vision of how we continue, as individual, team, or community, to experience a happiness or absence of care so intense, so rare, and so fleeting that we associate their experience with experience otherwise described as religious or we say the sports experience must be the tattered remnant of an experience which was once described, when first felt, as religious.

Romance is about putting things aright after some tragedy has put them asunder. It is about restoration of the right relations among things — and going home is where that restoration occurs because that is where it matters most.

If a family is an expression of continuity through biology, a city is an expression of continuity through will amd imagination — through mental choices making artifice, not through physical reproduction.