Insights From the Dead

In David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Hal Incandenza is a reluctant teenage tennis wunderkind at the very academy built by his father, whom killed himself by sticking his head in a microwave after realizing the limits of potential. In an order dictated by the fervid sweep of my ballpoint pen, these are some of Hal's and his brother's rules for survival, written, filmed, and recorded aloud in the mentally, muscularly, and osseously assaultive youth-camp training facility which can alternately pass for a grueling playground on which civic morale is generated and where good Americans are either broken into shards or made whole; they are snippets of insider advice that can pass for ways to succeed or stay alive in the self-sabotaging realms of, but not limited to: tennis, writing, or life in general for anyone for whom pressure and expectations (or in particular, living up to those social weights) have played a significant role, which is just about everyone. Pull from them what you will. Infinite Jest is about 1,000 plus pages of essential, fire-cracking wisdom, one phoneme after the other. 

"Here is how you handle being a feral prodigy. Here is how you handle being seeded at tournaments, signifying that seeding committees composed of old big-armed men publicly expect you to reach a certain round. Reaching at least the round you're supposed to is known at tournaments as 'justifying your seed.'

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn't hurt every minute.

Here is how to sweat.

What is unfair can be a stern but invaluable teacher.

Expect some rough dreams. They come with the territory. Try to accept them. Let them teach you.

Keep a flashlight by your bed. It helps with the dreams.

If you are an adolescent, here is the trick to being neither quite a nerd nor quite a jock: be no one.
It is easier than you think.

This is also how not to fear sleep or dreams. Never tell anyone where you are. Please learn the pragmatics of expressing fear: sometimes words that seem to express really invoke.
This is tricky.

Try to learn from everybody, especially those who fail.

How promising you are as a Student of the Game is a function of what you can pay attention to without running away. Nets and fences can be mirrors. And between the nets and fences, opponents are also mirrors. This is why the whole thing is scary. This is why all opponents are scary and weaker opponents are especially scary.

See yourself in your opponents. They will bring you to understand the Game. To accept the fact that the Game is about managed fear. That its object is to send from yourself what you hope will not return.

This is your body. They want you to know. You will have it with you always."