Did you watch the Belmont on Saturday?  I didn't, either.  Nor am I particularly an afficionado of horse racing.  However, I paid some attention to the Belmont this year as it seemed that, maybe, just maybe, it would produce the first Triple Crown winner (a horse who wins, in succession, the Kentucky Derby, Preakness Stakes, and Belmont) since 1978.
     And it did.  American Pharaoh won by five and a half lengths.  When I watched parts of the various replays that were floating around the Internet, I found myself amazed at how fast this horse ran, and how strong it appeared to be from start to finish.  It was a remarkable picture of grace and beauty, a magnificent display of an animal with a lengthy history of relationship between itself and the human being.  I found it a beautiful expression of life's possibilities.
     This notwithstanding, clearly, horse racing is a sport of the wealthy.  People purchase horses for tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars and, if the horse is fast, go on to earn many, many millions on their investment.  After all, they can.  In addition, they might argue that even if their sport seems, in the big picture, rather trivial, it does generate jobs and entertainment for thousands, maybe millions of other people.  The horses who race love to run, the people who ride them love to ride them, and the watching public loves the show.  What could be missing?
     Maybe nothing.  Or maybe everything.  Either way, we must ask ourselves, as we must ask ourselves about every human activity:  absent a metaphysical underpinning, what's the point?  It was great, it was grand, but as Ecclesiastes 8 observes, one day, "its memory will be forgotten."
     Shouldn't life be more than this?