the third place

In the window on glass shelves there stood an ornamental collection of small glass bottles, Venetian and Swedish. They came with the house. The sun now caught them. They were pierced with the light. Herzog saw the waves, the threads of colour, the spectral intersecting bars, and especially a great blot of flaming white on the centre of the wall.
--Saul Bellow.

To go in close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning, hierarchies and self.
---R. Sennett.

The rush for third place:

"This is the game that no-one wanted to play."
(a comment on the Uruguay-Germany match).

Something tragic about third-place play offs. Whether you win or lose it doesn't really matter. No-one remembers you anyway. It's a surreal experience, watching two professional teams suddenly lose all their seriousness and almost become child-like, naive. The game, like a Sunday morning, can offer some pleasures but ultimately suffers from a foreboding sense of its own futility. You watch it knowing that as soon as you turn your face away it will disappear, like a dream, like Venice.

And the squad photographs before the game (this time it's the whole squad, not just the team) is quaint-as if to say: this is the last time we might be together, it doesn't matter, we have to carry on..we've missed our opportunity, it will never come again, that moment wasn't ours after all. For some it will be their last game. But that's the way it's always been. Come and go. Lives briefly lit up by the spectacle, and then a return to the grey. Does philosophy really help here, all those books (which you can't remember anyway)? Better to follow Khayyam, and drink, drink...