Baseball players also test experience to try to find something genuine. Hitting the ball turns out to be a deception that leads only to passivity at one of the bases. Touching a base for safety is a kind of death. A lead off base is life but it is life with danger because nine enemy players try to force a runner back to his base and block his advancement. The enemy players all want to eliminate a base runner, to put him out. For a player to swing his arms furiously and feel his legs pumping up and down as he runs at top speed towards a new base or towards the plate is real life. The only genuine being of a base runner is base running. The bases threaten to make the base runner accept the falsity of attaching himself to a base rather than running along the course of the bases and existing truly. Evil is borrowed being. It is non-being posing as being. The base runner must not borrow his being by touching a base. Rather than posing as being by holding a foot against a base, he must create his being by leading off base. He has faith that his true being is not identical with his present existence on the bases. He must not let himself become the same as this new existence. Transcendentalists also wanted nothing to do with an existence rooted in the traditional Christian experiences offered them by their Protestant background. They were certain another superior and more genuine existence was possible. If it meant adopting a spiritual way of life that was not Christian, then so be it. Get rid of everything that is not real life. Don’t remain in contact with anything that prevents you from feeling what is genuine. Leave your base. Try to find your true home.
Daniel McNeill
Read the complete essay, Transcendentalism and Baseball, at the website of The United States of the World at: www.usoftheworld.com/culture
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