A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace
Authors: David Foster Wallace
Ads: Link
signify fair territory,
give the courts the eerie look of well-rivered sections of Illinois, seen from back aloft.
A tennis court, 78' × 27', looks, from above, with its slender rectangles of doubles alleys flanking its whole length, like
a cardboard carton with flaps folded back. The net, 3.5 feet high at the posts, divides the court widthwise in half; the service
lines divide each half again into backcourt and fore-. In the two forecourts, lines that run from the base of the net’s center
to the service lines divide them into 21' × 13.5' service boxes. The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with
the fact that—wind and your more exotic-type spins aside—balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook
tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes
what football is to infantry and attrition.
Tennis-wise, I had two preternatural gifts to compensate for not much physical talent. Make that three. The first was that
I always sweated so much that I stayed fairly ventilated in all weathers. Oversweating seems an ambivalent blessing, and it
didn’t exactly do wonders for my social life in high school, but it meant I could play for hours on a Turkish-bath July day
and not flag a bit so long as I drank water and ate salty stuff between matches. I always looked like a drowned man by about
game four, but I didn’t cramp, vomit, or pass out, unlike the gleaming Peoria kids whose hair never even lost its part right
up until their eyes rolled up in their heads and they pitched forward onto the shimmering concrete. A bigger asset still was
that I was extremely comfortable inside straight lines. None of the odd geometric claustrophobia that turns some gifted juniors
into skittish zoo animals after a while. I found I felt best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved
corners. This was environmental. Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest,
fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally
in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at
Urbana, plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north. In the late morning,
the Salerno guy’s statue had a squat black shadow-arm against grass dense enough to putt on; in the evening the sun galvanized
his left profile and cast his arm’s accusing shadow out to the right, bent at the angle of a stick in a pond. At college it
suddenly occurred to me during a quiz that the differential between the direction the statue’s hand pointed and the arc of
its shadow’s rotation was first-order. Anyway, most of my memories of childhood—whether of furrowed acreage, or of a harvester’s
sentry duty along RR104W, or of the play of sharp shadows against the Legion Hall softball field’s dusk—I could now reconstruct
on demand with an edge and protractor.
I liked the sharp intercourse of straight lines more than the other kids I grew up with. I think this is because they were
natives, whereas I was an infantile transplant from Ithaca, where my dad had Ph.D.’d. So I’d known, even horizontally and semiconsciously
as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I’m pretty sure I kept the amorphous
mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children
I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township’s planar
layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think it significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing
smart right-faces in razor-creased dress
give the courts the eerie look of well-rivered sections of Illinois, seen from back aloft.
A tennis court, 78' × 27', looks, from above, with its slender rectangles of doubles alleys flanking its whole length, like
a cardboard carton with flaps folded back. The net, 3.5 feet high at the posts, divides the court widthwise in half; the service
lines divide each half again into backcourt and fore-. In the two forecourts, lines that run from the base of the net’s center
to the service lines divide them into 21' × 13.5' service boxes. The sharply precise divisions and boundaries, together with
the fact that—wind and your more exotic-type spins aside—balls can be made to travel in straight lines only, make textbook
tennis plane geometry. It is billiards with balls that won’t hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes
what football is to infantry and attrition.
Tennis-wise, I had two preternatural gifts to compensate for not much physical talent. Make that three. The first was that
I always sweated so much that I stayed fairly ventilated in all weathers. Oversweating seems an ambivalent blessing, and it
didn’t exactly do wonders for my social life in high school, but it meant I could play for hours on a Turkish-bath July day
and not flag a bit so long as I drank water and ate salty stuff between matches. I always looked like a drowned man by about
game four, but I didn’t cramp, vomit, or pass out, unlike the gleaming Peoria kids whose hair never even lost its part right
up until their eyes rolled up in their heads and they pitched forward onto the shimmering concrete. A bigger asset still was
that I was extremely comfortable inside straight lines. None of the odd geometric claustrophobia that turns some gifted juniors
into skittish zoo animals after a while. I found I felt best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved
corners. This was environmental. Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest,
fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally
in terms of their secants!) around a three-intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at
Urbana, plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north. In the late morning,
the Salerno guy’s statue had a squat black shadow-arm against grass dense enough to putt on; in the evening the sun galvanized
his left profile and cast his arm’s accusing shadow out to the right, bent at the angle of a stick in a pond. At college it
suddenly occurred to me during a quiz that the differential between the direction the statue’s hand pointed and the arc of
its shadow’s rotation was first-order. Anyway, most of my memories of childhood—whether of furrowed acreage, or of a harvester’s
sentry duty along RR104W, or of the play of sharp shadows against the Legion Hall softball field’s dusk—I could now reconstruct
on demand with an edge and protractor.
I liked the sharp intercourse of straight lines more than the other kids I grew up with. I think this is because they were
natives, whereas I was an infantile transplant from Ithaca, where my dad had Ph.D.’d. So I’d known, even horizontally and semiconsciously
as a baby, something different, the tall hills and serpentine one-ways of upstate NY. I’m pretty sure I kept the amorphous
mush of curves and swells as a contrasting backlight somewhere down in the lizardy part of my brain, because the Philo children
I fought and played with, kids who knew and had known nothing else, saw nothing stark or new-worldish in the township’s planar
layout, prized nothing crisp. (Except why do I think it significant that so many of them wound up in the military, performing
smart right-faces in razor-creased dress
Similar Books
