A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace

My hand-eye was OK, but I was neither large nor quick, had a I was, even by the standards of junior competition in which everyone's a bud of pure potential, a pretty untalented tennis player.

My flirtation with tennis excellence had way more to do with the township where I learned and trained and with a weird proclivity for intuitive At fourteen I was ranked seventeenth in the United States Tennis Association's Western Section ('Western' being the creakily ancient USTA's designationįor the Midwest farther west were the Southwest, Northwest, and Pacific Northwest sections). I made my competitive bones beating up on lawyers' and dentists' kids at little Champaign and Urbana Country Club events and was soon killing whole summers beingĭriven through dawns to tournaments all over Illinois, Indiana, Iowa. In the flush 1960s to make outlying non sequiturs like 'farm and bedroom community' lucid.īetween the ages of twelve and fifteen I was a near-great junior tennis player. Levittown homes whose native residents did little but sell crop insurance and nitrogen fertilizer and herbicide and collect property taxes from the young academics at nearby Champaign-Urbana's university, whose ranks swelled enough This was in my home of Philo, Illinois, a tiny collection of corn silos and war-era In late childhood I learned how to play tennis on the blacktop courts of a small public park carved from farmland that had been nitrogenized too often to farm anymore.

Calculus was, quite literally, child's play. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up it dismantled memory and put it in light. The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates. I'd grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids-and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain-swirl College mathĮvokes and catharts a Midwesterner's sickness for home. When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad's alma mater in the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again by David Foster Wallace