Finite and Infinite Games

by James P. Carse

Genuine travel has no destination. Travelers do not go somewhere, but constantly discover they are somewhere else.

Genuine travelers travel not to overcome distance but to discover distance. It is not distance that makes travel necessary, but travel that makes distance possible. Distance is not determined by the measurable length between objects, but by the actual differences between them. The motels around the airports in Chicago and Atlanta are so little different from the motels around the airports of Tokyo and Frankfurt that all essential distances dissolve in likeness. What is truly separated is distinct; it is unlike.

“The only true voyage would be not to travel through a hundred different lands with the same pair of eyes, but to see the same land through a hundred different pairs of eyes” (Proust). A

Infinite players are not serious actors in any story, but the joyful poets of a story that continues to originate what they cannot finish.