Gerhardt Schtitt, Head Coach of I.J.’s junior tennis academy (very central to plot), and Mario Incandenza, disabled younger brother of m.c. Hal, discuss over p. 75-78 the beauty of tennis; relevant quotes:
“[Schtitt] Seemed intuitively to sense that it [locating beauty 1 in match play] was a matter not of reduction [chaos to pattern] at all, but of expansion, of uncontrolled, metastatic growth of possible move and response, this diagnate infinity of infinities, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game.” 2
“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 an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place.”
> I spent the last 9 months floating.
I had soft routine: I’d work out regularly, eat, read, write.
But today is the first day of a new semester and this time I am actually on campus, going to class 3.
Yesterday’s shower was unhurried, unbounded. I stood there dreaming until I felt too hot.
Today, I set an alarm; if my mind forgot the time, I’d be late for an 8 am.
I’d forgotten how it felt to live between blocks of time. To have structure.
It’s very frantic.
I abandoned this 9 months ago because I thought I felt it limiting me. But today I found I was doing the things I'd normally do in career-limbo, faster. I did them better. I did them more efficiently. It (life) becoming defined made time a losable game; the threat of missing class, the meeting, although as artificial as checkmate, felt very real and very important.
This is a trick; these manufactured bounds. Like lines on a tennis court. But they define a space which allows me to engage with and expand past (previously-unknown and artificial) self-bounds.
We are curious things.
- “and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory”↩
- “Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but
— perversely —of expansion,the aleatory flutterof uncontrolled, metastatic growth— each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian continuum of infinitiesof possible move and response,Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained,this diagnate infinity of infinitiesof choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self.”↩ - Admittedly, to find out what’s skippable.↩