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Recreational drugs are more or less traditional at any U.S. secondary school, maybe because of the unprecedented tensions: post-latency and puberty and angst and impending adulthood, etc.
American experience seems to suggest that people are virtually unlimited in their need to give themselves away, on various levels. Some just prefer to do it in secret.
Like most North Americans of his generation, Hal tends to know way less about why he feels certain ways about the objects and pursuits he’s devoted to than he does about the objects and pursuits themselves. It’s hard to say for sure whether this is even exceptionally bad, this tendency.
One of the positives to being visibly damaged is that people can sometimes forget you’re there, even when they’re interfacing with you. You almost get to eavesdrop. It’s almost like they’re like: If nobody’s really in there, there’s nothing to be shy about. That’s why bullshit often tends to drop away around damaged listeners, deep beliefs revealed, diary-type private reveries indulged out loud; and, listening, the beaming and bradykinetic boy gets to forge an interpersonal connection he knows only he can truly feel, here.
A U.S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness:
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. The competing boy on the net’s other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self.
junior athletics is but one facet of the real gem: life’s endless war against the self you cannot live without.
Sometimes he finds out he believes something that he doesn’t even know he believed until it exits his mouth
‘Find me one of them Northeast Oklahoma drive-in burger-stand waitresses with the great big huge titties.’
Something humble, placid even, about inert feet under stall doors. The defecatory posture is an accepting posture, it occurs to him. Head down, elbows on knees, the fingers laced together between the knees. Some hunched timeless millennial type of waiting, almost religious.
‘Are we not all of us fanatics? I say only what you of the U.S.A. only pretend you do not know. Attachments are of great seriousness. Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care. What you wish to sing of as tragic love is an attachment not carefully chosen. Die for one person? This is a craziness. Persons change, leave, die, become ill. They leave, lie, go mad, have sickness, betray you, die. Your nation outlives you. A cause outlives you.’
the slave who believes he is free. The most pathetic of bondage. Not tragic. No songs. You believe you would die twice for another but in truth would die only for your alone self, its sentiment.’
He’ll mention America. He’ll talk patriotism and don’t think he won’t. He’ll talk about it’s patriotic play that’s the high road to the thing. He’s not American but I tell you straight out right here he makes me proud to be American. Mein kinder. He’ll say it’s how to learn to be a good American during a time, boys, when America isn’t good its own self.’
its’ a never ending strugle its’ a full time job to stay straight and there is no vacation for XMas at anytime. Its’ a fucking bitch of a life dont’ let any body get over on you diffrent.
potential may be worse than none,
I’m so scared of dying without ever being really seen. Can you understand?
talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.
feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be on guard.
The monologues seem both free-associative and intricately structured, not unlike nightmares.
the Enfield Tennis Academy is the only athletic-focus-type school in North America that still adheres to the trivium and quadrivium of the hard-ass classical L.A.S. tradition, 64 and thus one of the very few extant sports academies that makes a real stab at being a genuine pre-college school and not just an Iron Curtainish jock-factory.
shrugging its shoulders at some pointless indignity.
That everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.
That God might regard the issue of whether you believe there’s a God or not as fairly low on his/her/its list of things s/he/it’s interested in re you.
the prodigious punter’s father, infinite jester, director of a final opus so magnum he’d claimed to have had it locked away.
He’s one of these people who don’t need much, much less much more.
Who would die for this chance to be fed this death of pleasure with spoons, in their warm homes, alone, unmoving:
Marathe wondered why the presence of Americans could always make him feel vaguely ashamed after saying things he believed. An aftertaste of shame after revealing passion of any belief and type when with Americans, as if he had made flatulence instead of had revealed belief.
American penchant for absolution via irony
our whole system is founded on your individual’s freedom to pursue his own individual desires.’
There’s serious pain in being sober, though,
the key to the successful administration of a top-level junior tennis academy lies in cultivating a kind of reverse-Buddhism, a state of Total Worry.
Sometimes it’s hard to believe the sun’s the same sun over all different parts of the planet.
the machine they’re all dying to throw themselves into.
Deluded or not, it’s still a lucky way to live. Even though it’s temporary.
to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile,
There’s something elementally horrific about waking before dawn.
We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.
