Caravaggio, Narcissus, ca. 1594-96; oil on canvas, 110 × 92 cm (43.3 × 36.2 in), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica  

As she waded ashore through the surf at Key West on Labor Day, the sixty-four-year-old endurance swimmer Diana Nyad said to a crowd of bystanders and waiting reporters who had gathered there: “I have three messages. One is we should never, ever give up. Two is you never are too old to chase your dreams. Three is it looks like a solitary sport, but it’s a team.” Well, it certainly is a team—thirty-five members strong, according to The New York Times, not counting the one who actually did the swimming part. But what kind of “sport” is it? They used to say that baseball was America’s national pastime, but nowadays I wonder if we don’t have to give the nod to “dream”-chasing. And the dream, ex hypothesi, is always the drearily familiar one of celebrity. In the case of Miss Nyad, who comes by her apparent nominal determinism (though the Greek Naiads were exclusively fresh-water spirits) through her Greek stepfather, it was endorsed by the President too, who tweeted his congratulations to her along with the redundant exhortation: “Never give up on your dreams.”