How does a golf ball take flight and change from a repository of potential energy to a bolt of kinetic energy—a missile?

While lost balls compel Updike and Lindsay to ponder mortality, they can also draw us beyond the safe and familiar boundaries of our experience and bring us into contact with another, secret life. Our

the collapse of the gutta-percha

in the channel between boredom and frustration.

transcendence through negation of the ball.

fundamental task of the course architect changed from adapting golf to the landscape to adapting the landscape to golf.

alchemy of colors and nomenclature to invoke a range of abstract values about tradition, social status, and gender.

beginning of some unknown archaeology of the future.

tendency of errant golf balls to find the boundary between domesticated and wild landscapes.