Peaceable Kingdom

It seems most everyone I know has paused and allowed themselves to be transcended by these '08 Olympic games.

"We stay up all night to watch and sleep in late.... It's so nice," my novelist friend Jennie Nash writes. "It is constantly astounding to me to watch what the human body can do," writes a dear dancer-friend who herself has done the near impossible, soared and spun on national (presidential, even) stages. Our French friends were here on Friday night, speaking of Michael Phelps. My emails are full of did-you-see's? Last night a friend joined us for dinner and it wasn't the dinner that mattered so much as what happened afterward and who we got to see—the impeccably dignified (there is no underestimating her dignity) Shawn Johnson, the explosive 100 meter track-and-field women, the fearless Chinese divers. Dessert was the calm and good feeling of this shared odyssey, this honoring of the exceptional, the sacrificed for, the achieved.

Put a Michael Phelps into an Olympics game, give us Lezak magic or Nastia Liukin grace, give the diplomatic Aaron Piersol a moment to speak, and we become, through them, and just for an instant, somehow saved. We become believers in forces so much greater than ourselves, which is a balming brand of faith.