Treat on Hallowmas Eve

1.  33-3!   And the score doesn't even begin to tell the story.  For the second week in a row, the Raiders absolutely crushed their opponent.  This week's sacrificial victim was the Seahawks--a team I used to hate a lot before the Seahawks decamped to the NFC when the league realigned--now I really don't care about the Seahwaks--though I must admit that I still have a hard time thinking kind thoughts about Steve Largent, even though he has turned into a very fine politician.  But I digress.  The Raiders were once again Dominant.  The Raiders haven't looked this good since their Super Bowl season--for two weeks, they played like a team that knows how to win.  Next up: The Kansas City Chiefs.  (By the way--I hate the Chiefs--not as much as I hate the Broncos, but pretty close.)  If the Raiders play this way for a third week in a row...well, playoffs, here we come.

2. This Sunday night presents the annual test of Sports Loyalty.  Right now, the Giants and Rangers are playing in Game 4 of the World Series and the Steelers and Saints are playing a regular season game.  You can tell a lot about a person by finding out which game is being watched.  The Steelers don't look nearly as good as I thoght they were going to look.

3.  The Raiders play the Steelers in three weeks.  I think they can beat them.  Easily.

4. I reread T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets tonight.  Amazing poetry--but, that is pretty obvious.  It got me to thinking--as Eliot's poetry always does.  (And note, what follows is not meant as a summary of Four Quartets or even the main idea or overview of it.  The Summary of Four Quartets?  You are joking, right?  It cannot be summarized.)  The following lines got me wondering:

What was to be the value of the long looked forward to,
Long hoped for calm, the autumnal serenity
And the wisdom of age?
[...]
There is, it seems to us,
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience.
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies,
For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been.

(that's from East Coker, II)

Much of the Four Quartets is about the nature of time.  We spend most of our lives living either in anticipation of the future or dwelling in the past.  To live in the present is difficult--well, maybe it is impossible.  Can we ever live in the present--I mean really live in the present--not thinking about where we are going or where we have been?  Now that passage above got me pondering--why do I spend so much time reading?  What knowledge or wisdom do I hope to gain?  I read because I am thinking about the future.  But why do I watch football? Why did I love to see the Raiders destroy the Seahawks today?  I started wondering while reading Eliot if perhaps football is, for me, a succession of times in which I live in the present.  For 3 hours, the rest of the world is set aside--it is a timeless bubble of joy and agony.  The joy and the agony last after the moment--in the world outside the game, the feelings of the game persist.  But in the moment of the game, there is no outside world intruding in.  For 3 hours, whether the Raiders score and whether they stop their opponent from scoring is all there is.  Timelessness.

I suspect when I think about this more, I'll realize that the above isn't quite right--but it sure seems right.