I feel more kinship and intimacy with certain characters described in books and certain images I've seen in prints than I feel with many so-called real people, who are of that metaphysical insignificance known as flesh and blood. And 'flesh and blood' in fact describes them rather well: they're like chunks of meat displayed in the window of a butcher's, dead things bleeding as if they were alive, shanks and cutlets of Destiny.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, text 317
OK, first off I should just go ahead and admit that one of my fantasy baseball team is going to be retitled Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny of next year. In the Irrational League, which I helped found thirty-five years ago, my team is a bottom dweller season after season, mainly because I just don't pay much attention to baseball any more. I'm hanging around in the league mainly to be supportive of my friends. Consequently, I tend to swap out the names pretty routinely now, mainly to preserve the sanctity of the Atlanta Crackers - my original team name, and one in which I won a lot. My gross incompetence now besmirches the legacy of that proud name, and I rotate in and out of other names And, seriously, who could not root for the Shanks and Cutlets of Destiny.
More importantly, Pessoa is, once again, discussing his love of the world of literature and art, where true reality resides, and his mistrust of the coarse physical world that surrounds us. Yes, he's being more than a bit of over the top, but he's correct in recognizing that what we think is important is often anything but. Not that family and friends aren't important, obviously, and he was loyal to both, but instead that we place so much importance on people who are of absolutely no importance whatsoever. What's more, our society - now more than then - focus our attention, endlessly, on the "famous" and "interesting" at the expense of truly meaningful. Is it any wonder that we live in the age of Donald Trump?
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