Werner Herzog

The inarticulate majesty of suffering. One wonders, after so many minuscule failures, if the lost season is a metaphor for something beyond the human capacity for pain. I prefer to watch the game from the highest corners of the stadium, where the players appear as tiny shadows on a vast green plain, stripped of their celebrity. It is a paradox to view the game this way. From here, the players no longer seem like players, nor men. Instead, I feel as if I am watching atomic particles scramble chaotically through their molecular orbits. Gazing upon the activities, I cannot overcome the sensation that I am staring into my own fingerprints, that I am lost in the elegant swirls of human individuality, afraid that the fact of my skin has erased me as a person. Can an entire group of men go simultaneously insane? A ball drops, and two shadows go after it, until one of them obtains it and flings it back toward the nucleus of the game. I soon leave, unaware of the particulars--who has won, and who has lost. But these facts seem incidental. I walk instead through an inescapable vortex, aware that I myself am more shadow than man, one constituent of the unruly cosmos governing our realities--the game is a cell composed of cells, of which I myself am one and many, and the universe is the entirety, the grand conqueror staring upon the world from the darkened recesses of being.