Show Notes:
1. The Life of Reilly by Rick Reilly
2. Definition of a juggernaut - a massive force that crushes whatever is in its path.
3. Baseball diamond (not a baseball course)
4. A beautifully written and rich article about the Algierian writer Albert Camus and football (soccer). Author M.M. Owen:
Consider this: What could be more absurd than 22 people chasing a sphere of inflated leather around a rectangle of grass for 90 minutes, and believing that the amount of times said sphere crosses a couple of painted lines is a matter of the most profound importance? In any sort of rational analysis, football is fundamentally ridiculous. A flurry of imaginary meaning.
But in the absurdist analysis, human striving of any sort is fundamentally ridiculous. Zoom out until yours is the long view of the cosmos, and there is no essential difference between chasing a football and chasing a career, or a first home, or the eradication of racial injustice, or your soulmate. All of our huffing and puffing will exhaust itself and be forgotten, in time. Thus, to find meaning anywhere in life, Camus thought, required approaching it with more than cold reason. It required encountering reality in different states of mind. Like many people who have known real poverty in their youth, Camus was first and foremost a pragmatist. He wanted to know what worked. And like Ivan in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov – a book he liked so much he adapted it for the stage – Camus sensed that what gave life meaning were those things you love “not with your mind, not with logic, but with your insides, your guts.