Austin Meakim’s Reviews > A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments > Status Update

There will be thunder . . .' The prisoner turned and squinted into the sun . . . ' later, towards evening. A walk would do you a great deal of good and I should be happy to go with you. Some new thoughts have just come into my head which you might, I think, find interesting and I should like to discuss them with you, the more so as you strike me as a man of great intelligence.'

And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

I am now 33 years old, and it feels like much time has passed and is passing faster and faster every day. Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all other options those choices foreclose.

Shipping Out / A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again

He is an American and he wants to win. He wants this, and he will pay to have it—will pay just to pursue it, let it define him—and will pay with the regretless cheer of a man for whom issues of choice became irrelevant long ago. Already, for Joyce, at 22, it’s too late for anything else: he’s invested too much, is in too deep. I think he’s both lucky and un-. He will say he is happy and mean it. Wish him well.

Michael Joyce is, in other words, a complete man (though in a grotesquely limited way). But he wants more. Not more completeness; he doesn’t think in terms of virtues or transcendence. He wants to be the best, to have his name known, to hold professional trophies over his head as he patiently turns in all four directions for the media.

But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him tobecome a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test parts of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain or exhaustion, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure.

The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque; and in certain ways Joyce himself is a grotesque.

Whether or not he ends up in the top ten and a name anybody will know, Michael Joyce will remain a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination for me.

“If I’m in like a bar, and there’s a really good-looking girl, I might be kind of nervous.But if there’s like a thousand gorgeous girls in the stands when I’m playing, it’s a different story. I’m not nervous then, when I play, because I know what I’m doing. I know what to do out there.” Maybe it’s good to let these be his last quoted words.