The philosophy of cricket

"[the very sophisticated feature of cricket is] that one can appreciate the significant detail of the monotony that lies before one at a given time only because one understands remote and hypothetical moments of excitement that might grow from it"
---Bernard Williams, The Point of View of the Universe:Sidgwick and the Ambitions of Ethics.

"Sport, serving the same needs as the myths and religious traditions utilised by sculpture and painting, offers its own culture of parable, tragedy and redemption-its own art...affords the same potential for the expression of genius, passion and vision."
---Geoff Dyer.

"I think that the task of the American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain, but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony. The umpires in clericals, sifting the souls of the players; the faint thunder as ten thousand people, at the bottom of the eighth, head for the exits. The sense of moral judgement embodied in a migratory vastness."
---John Cheever

How to explain cricket to those who don't understand it? The simple answer, as with much else, is that you can't! So that it appears to such a person much more mysterious than it really is or, alternatively, just a silly pursuit by people who haven't really grown up (does this apply to blogging as well?). Without a common world, words and rules don't amount to much?

A lot of it is bound up nowadays with petty nationalism. Of course one likes to see India and England lose, but that's not at the heart of the game...