What if the temple comes to Mohammed?
Some friends and I have taken the summer as an opportunity to wrestle Infinite Jest into submission. I knew a lot going in, mostly about the author, a little bit about the plot (if the massive, baggy, unwieldy thing can be said to have a plot), some of the themes, but mostly the author and his later work, which I'd had the pleasure of reading. I knew that he'd been a highly skilled tennis player as a youth and that this understanding of the sport, when coupled with his linguistic dexterity, could make for incredibly imaginative and expansive results.
Part of the novel--a large part, I'm led to believe--takes place at an elite tennis academy (its initials are, quite literally, E.T.A.), and so much of the milieu/environ/atmosphere is wonderfully and sometimes heartbreakingly put together. A man character, tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza (in a school full, more or less, of tennis prodigies), is a Big Buddy, an official mentor to some of the younger student-athletes. During a bull session that begins around pg. 109, Hal philosophizes on how bitching about a horrible shared experience accentuates the shared part of the shared experience and hypothesizes that these bitch sessions are built into their athletic regimen, the object providing the kids with a common enemy so that they may be propelled towards their best (athletic/mental) selves.
Pg. 115 gets to another groups Big-Little Buddy session where one of the Big Buddies educates his youngins on how progress happens in their world, "because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.' (115)
He then goes on to talk about 3 types of people defeated by plateaus: 1) the Despairing type, when afflicted by the plateau, gives in to frustration and despair, "because he hasn't got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog" (115). Then comes the 2) Obsessive who tries to will himself off the plateau and ends up plunging himself into premature and debilitating injury. And finally (worst of all) the Complacent type who finds contentment on the plateau, even as those players he used to be begin beating him, the type of player who restructures his entire game around the plateau and struggles to maintain that contentment even as others find the holes in his game, the fleshy spaces in his armor.
In preparation for a day of study for the Bar Exam, I box. Maybe about 3-4 mornings a week, I make my way to this place (with the aid of my brand. new. car!) and I learn how to trust my body again and I get to exorcise some demons and I get to be in the company of good people sweating out bad habits and letting work and improvement pin burn in the slice between deltoid and bicep. It's easily the best part of the day, the most honest, the most spiritually fulfilling, and the part where my confidence is most likely to find a boost. It helps that I've boxed before, but there are always new things to learn and learning is easier here. I sometimes wonder if it's because learning comes more quickly here or if it's because I have more confidence in physical ability than I ever had in cerebral exertion.
I imagine, in the general psychic trajectory of historical law school graduates preparing for the (New York) Bar Exam, the end of June/beginning of July represented a sort of nadir; either they'd reached the plateau or they found themselves getting actively worse. I was reassured by a Bar Exam veteran that this is normal. Or, rather, that it happens. She used the analogy of language, saying that I'd learned words and could form sentences but that I was far from fluency. Which makes sense.
I seem to need constant reminding that there's yet time between now and the exam and some of that time will inevitably include me getting better at these practice questions or at memorizing the law or at structuring a memo. But, because this is a law(school)-related endeavor, there is always the impulse towards competition and each major assessment, at its completion, shows your score and the average score of test-takers who've completed that task. And if that gulf ain't the most dispiriting thing...
At this point in the game, here at the end of Act II (this is me thinking optimistically), I'd rather get punched in the face than continue along this track. By the time my workout ends, the body is wearied but the spirit is rendered verdant and vital. And no matter how many dark nights of the soul are prompted by the rest of the day's Bar Study (I'm talking *bituminous*), I know I got another morning of getting (almost) punched in the head under Papo's guidance to look forward to. I'll take that over Civil Procedure 11 times out of 10.
The common wisdom is that sports has life lessons built into it. That's the stereotype, at least. The teamwork you practice in a thing like (American) football will help you be a better team player in the workplace or something like that. Or the endurance you develop as a swimmer will help you stay up late at the tail end of an 80-hr work week, or some such nonsense. There's probably a million life lessons in boxing--one that immediately springs to mind is that once you get hit in the face, you realize you're not made of glass and it gets easier to keep doing the difficult thing.
Plateaus and whatnot.
But this thing. This thing that's got me snapping at my family, spending as much time as possible away from home, caught in a flash of rage when the octogenarians in the study area want to talk as loudly as possible about Nixon and healthcare and talk radio; this thing that has me throttling so quickly towards fury and despair and from which I have to flee to find joy; this thing that's very nearly succeeded in convincing me that I'm the wrong kind of smart for this profession...if it were a choice between this and getting hit in the face, I think I could stand to lose a few teeth.
Maybe somewhere buried beneath the stereotype is an actual nugget of wisdom, carved out of my experience with sport, that has a few words for me regarding humbleness and patience.
Part of the novel--a large part, I'm led to believe--takes place at an elite tennis academy (its initials are, quite literally, E.T.A.), and so much of the milieu/environ/atmosphere is wonderfully and sometimes heartbreakingly put together. A man character, tennis prodigy Hal Incandenza (in a school full, more or less, of tennis prodigies), is a Big Buddy, an official mentor to some of the younger student-athletes. During a bull session that begins around pg. 109, Hal philosophizes on how bitching about a horrible shared experience accentuates the shared part of the shared experience and hypothesizes that these bitch sessions are built into their athletic regimen, the object providing the kids with a common enemy so that they may be propelled towards their best (athletic/mental) selves.
Pg. 115 gets to another groups Big-Little Buddy session where one of the Big Buddies educates his youngins on how progress happens in their world, "because you proceed toward mastery through a series of plateaus, so there's like radical improvement up to a certain plateau and then what looks like a stall, on the plateau, with the only way to get off one of the plateaus and climb up to the next one up ahead is with a whole lot of frustrating mindless repetitive practice and patience and hanging in there.' (115)
He then goes on to talk about 3 types of people defeated by plateaus: 1) the Despairing type, when afflicted by the plateau, gives in to frustration and despair, "because he hasn't got the humbleness and patience to hang in there and slog" (115). Then comes the 2) Obsessive who tries to will himself off the plateau and ends up plunging himself into premature and debilitating injury. And finally (worst of all) the Complacent type who finds contentment on the plateau, even as those players he used to be begin beating him, the type of player who restructures his entire game around the plateau and struggles to maintain that contentment even as others find the holes in his game, the fleshy spaces in his armor.
In preparation for a day of study for the Bar Exam, I box. Maybe about 3-4 mornings a week, I make my way to this place (with the aid of my brand. new. car!) and I learn how to trust my body again and I get to exorcise some demons and I get to be in the company of good people sweating out bad habits and letting work and improvement pin burn in the slice between deltoid and bicep. It's easily the best part of the day, the most honest, the most spiritually fulfilling, and the part where my confidence is most likely to find a boost. It helps that I've boxed before, but there are always new things to learn and learning is easier here. I sometimes wonder if it's because learning comes more quickly here or if it's because I have more confidence in physical ability than I ever had in cerebral exertion.
I imagine, in the general psychic trajectory of historical law school graduates preparing for the (New York) Bar Exam, the end of June/beginning of July represented a sort of nadir; either they'd reached the plateau or they found themselves getting actively worse. I was reassured by a Bar Exam veteran that this is normal. Or, rather, that it happens. She used the analogy of language, saying that I'd learned words and could form sentences but that I was far from fluency. Which makes sense.
I seem to need constant reminding that there's yet time between now and the exam and some of that time will inevitably include me getting better at these practice questions or at memorizing the law or at structuring a memo. But, because this is a law(school)-related endeavor, there is always the impulse towards competition and each major assessment, at its completion, shows your score and the average score of test-takers who've completed that task. And if that gulf ain't the most dispiriting thing...
At this point in the game, here at the end of Act II (this is me thinking optimistically), I'd rather get punched in the face than continue along this track. By the time my workout ends, the body is wearied but the spirit is rendered verdant and vital. And no matter how many dark nights of the soul are prompted by the rest of the day's Bar Study (I'm talking *bituminous*), I know I got another morning of getting (almost) punched in the head under Papo's guidance to look forward to. I'll take that over Civil Procedure 11 times out of 10.
The common wisdom is that sports has life lessons built into it. That's the stereotype, at least. The teamwork you practice in a thing like (American) football will help you be a better team player in the workplace or something like that. Or the endurance you develop as a swimmer will help you stay up late at the tail end of an 80-hr work week, or some such nonsense. There's probably a million life lessons in boxing--one that immediately springs to mind is that once you get hit in the face, you realize you're not made of glass and it gets easier to keep doing the difficult thing.
Plateaus and whatnot.
But this thing. This thing that's got me snapping at my family, spending as much time as possible away from home, caught in a flash of rage when the octogenarians in the study area want to talk as loudly as possible about Nixon and healthcare and talk radio; this thing that has me throttling so quickly towards fury and despair and from which I have to flee to find joy; this thing that's very nearly succeeded in convincing me that I'm the wrong kind of smart for this profession...if it were a choice between this and getting hit in the face, I think I could stand to lose a few teeth.
Maybe somewhere buried beneath the stereotype is an actual nugget of wisdom, carved out of my experience with sport, that has a few words for me regarding humbleness and patience.