Bobby Thomson home run ball tagged posts

The Sacramentality of “Things”

“What I was really getting at in Running Dog was a sense of the terrible acquisitiveness in which we live, coupled with a final indifference to the object. After all the mad attempts to acquire the thing, everyone suddenly decides that, well, maybe we really don’t care about this so much anyway.”

—From a 1988 interview with novelist Don DeLillo in Rolling Stone

Just under a decade later, DeLillo gave us Underworld, his epochal novel whose first 84 pages contain an almost hypnotic, you-are-there account of the seventh game of the 1951 World Series and the pursuit of the Bobby Thomson home run ball that capped the New York Giants’ improbable comeback against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The ball plays a pivotal role in the novel as it is pursued across time, geography and mystery by would-be possessors who have barely a glimmer of what fuels their own obsession.

Later in Underworld, a small group attends a ...

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