What's important

The family deserted me night before last, invited by friends to dinner and a swim across town.

I'm not complaining. Such occasions offer the rare, golden opportunity to hole up in my Little House for precious undisturbed hours of dedicated work. Or so I choose to call it.

I finally hauled in for a late leftover-swordfish salad dinner(much better than it sounds) at around 9, just in time to dine with ESPN's Baseball Tonight crew, John Kruk and Buck Showalter. They nattered on with great seriousness about such pressing matters as Manny Ramirez's latest display of self-regard and team indifference (he flung his bat after a called third strike) and Ryan Braun's allegedly-insolent suggestion that maybe his Brewers could use more pitching.

I was enjoying my dinner and all the Inside Baseball gossip-trivia, right up until the old green-eyed hydra Meaninglessnessreared up and challenged me to justify spending even a moment on such minutiae. Hardly cosmic, this overwrought attention to overpaid, uneducated athletes and their predictably egoistic bad behvior. Was I wasting my time? Yes, of course. But I mean, was I really wasting my time? What's "important," anyway?

"Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with reflective thought. But wherever it is found, there is the zest, the tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is "importance" in the only real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be." -William James, "On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings"

Well, that 's a relief. How 'bout that Albert Pujols?! Wonder how he'll do in the home-run derby next week?

But wait. Shouldn't it give us pause that some things make some of us tingle but not others? And that other people tingle to things we could care less about?

Maybe just a moment's pause, time to reflect that importance is fundamentally, unapologetically a subjective phenomenon. If we're going to insist on ultimate, objective, impersonal importance, we'll be leaving ourselves out of the picture. I'd rather not do that.

But I'll also probably not make a habit of tuning in regularly to John and Buck, either. There are more important unimportant diversions to attend to. Like, say, Joe Torre's Yankee Years...