I don’t know how it became normal and socially acceptable for grown people to walk about in groups with their tongues hanging out licking ice cream cones. What a bizarrely childish and somehow also bovine public activity.
Sorry about that twentieth century cultural institution you were fond of. We had to send that bad boy into the Maw. Yeah, nothing for it. No, I know, we all did, but I mean...what can you do? It was Maw time. At the end of the day you just gotta feed the Maw
In our competitive society, where it seems that only the strong and winners deserve to live, sport also teaches us how to lose. It forces us, in learning the art of losing, to confront our fragility, our limitations and our imperfections. It is through the experience of these limits that we open our hearts to hope. Athletes who never make mistakes, who never lose, do not exist.
I think a lot about the story from one of the last days that Lou Reed was alive, where he’s floating on his back in a swimming pool, and he says to his friends: “I am so susceptible to beauty right now.”
Our societies are too enslaved to market logic, and everything risks being subject to self-interest and the quest for profit. Volunteering is prophecy and a sign of hope, because it bears witness to the primacy of gratuitousness, solidarity, and service to those most in need.