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Out of This World


Think of the blind man’s stick as an extension of his consciousness, the opposite of a phantom limb. His sense of touch honed to a razor-sharp sensitivity. So too the racquet of the great tennis player, the ball to the genius footballer – not objects apart, but objects that have become wholly part of those individuals. Then if Federer seems to swing his racquet with impossible speed and grace, if Ronaldo is forever hungry for a ball he seems to will through the air and defenders’ legs, it is only because most of us, in possessing no more or less than our five ordinary senses, see everything through a largely shared aperture, the closest thing to an objective reality. Anything else is, quite literally, out of this world.

Vitor Pereira, from Pensamentos