Infinte Jest, post 2

It both is and is not an accident that Infinite Summer started the day before Wimbledon. The latter always starts around the first day of summer so by choosing the solstice for its start, Infinite Summer placed itself serendipitously in Wimbledon’s court.

My mother played tennis all while growing up, and while I was little. She had to quit due to damage to her elbow, caused by the old wooden rackets, but I have vague memories of seeing her on court. More clear are the memories of watching Wimbledon and other tennis tournaments with her. Most especially, though, those memories are of getting up early, early to watch Martina and Chris, John and Jimmy — and later Boris and Stephie, Pete and Andre, poor Jennifer and Monica with their cut-short careers, Venus and Serena — on the green courts of Wimbledon. Sometimes we even had strawberries for our cereal in celebration.

This only matters, of course, because tennis takes up so much space in Infinite Jest, which most likely only happened because DFW was himself quite a good tennis player (he writes amazingly well about it in this piece on Roger Federer — well worth the read even if you don’t know tennis, first because it will teach you and second because it’s indicative of DFW’s writing style and acumen).

And so in celebration of tennis, here’s a favorite bit:

The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. … Tennis’s beauty’s infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is essentially a tragic experience…. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within to be killed and mourned over and over again. (p. 84)

But because my own practice is of the yogic variety, here’s also this:

Everyone should get at least one good look at the eyes of a man who finds himself rising toward what he wants to pull down to himself. And I like how the guru on the towel dispenser doesn’t laugh at them, or even shake his head sagely on its big brown neck. He just smiles, hiding his tongue. He’s like a baby. Everything he sees hits him and sinks without bubbles. He just sits there. I want to be like that. Able to just sit all quiet and pull life toward me…. (p. 128)

These two quotes keep circling each other like a yin-yang symbol ( no, not the one referred to by the U.S.S. Millicent Kent).