“Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around
the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming.
He ran as he always ran out home runs–hurriedly, unsmiling,
head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of.
He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted
‘We want Ted’ for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back.
Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of
immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality
is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even
the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us
in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”
– John Updike,
a eulogy for baseball legend Ted Williams
published in The New Yorker, Oct. 22, 1960