“I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables—for example, a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on, and then on even farther when the opponent’s own positions and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in. No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange—smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e. by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.”
“Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness”
This is a top-five passage from David Foster Wallace. In college I used prefatory quotes to my papers, and this was a prefatory quote to a long paper I wrote about Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. The idea behind my thinking1 was that Wallace uses his considerable intellection to describe the ridiculous complication of tennis, all in order to show that the sport is beautiful because it rearticulates a cacophony of precision into an almost ineluctably beautiful and simple game. This description, then, is important because it self-consciously undermines the entire Wittgenstinian project of boiling down the complexity of possible underlying descriptions into holistically untroubling analogies.2
Wallace is deeply in on the joke. Nineties Wallace writes in an overcomplicated style the same way people now talk about ascots and monocles to evince old-timeyness: It’s a way to signify artistically while drawing attention to the fact that signification is kind of a ridiculous endeavor for a working person in the twenty-first century.
The circularity of his style seems appealing. As it offers a panopticon-like view of artistic and objective integrity, it presents as the very least open form of writing or cognition you could think of.3 I know from reading other essays that Wallace understood really well along with basically everyone else that philosophy and especially Wittgenstein’s philosophy is concerned with being at home in the world (as in, resisting solipsism). And like Wittgenstein, his early work is still dogged by solitude.
New year’s resolution two is to not be so solipsistic.
That some of Wallace’s most obtusely effusive prose is employed in order to show the limit cases of humanity is not an accident. It shows Wallace’s own lexical-intellectual grotesquery. Which is both poignant and sad, like a lot, again, of early Wallace. His development, like that of a pro-caliber athlete, described a line with a large, positive-value m, and like a lot of people/artists, ir does kind of pain me when people blanket condemn (and praise) capital W Wallace. People develop. New year’s resolution three is to continue to develop.
