Both Flesh and Not

"This is David Foster Wallace’s Both Flesh and Not , a collection of his essays, the longest and lead essay of which is an essay on Roger Federer called ‘Federer Both Flesh and Not’, that was originally a New York Times’ piece about how watching Federer was like a religious experience. Foster Wallace sadly committed suicide. He was a terrific novelist, and was himself a very interesting character. Apart from his 1000-page novel, Infinite Jest , he wrote a book about the mathematics of infinity, Everything and More , which is maybe a failed attempt, but a very interesting failed attempt, involving a lot of detailed mathematics. On top of that, he had been a competitive junior tennis player at state level, and spent many of his teenage years in tennis camps. So he writes about Federer with the kind of knowledge that a competitor himself would have. One of the things in the essay is an appreciation of the value and beauty of sport. He says that the aim of sport is not to be beautiful, to be aesthetic, but inevitably this is something that comes out. There’s a nice phrase he uses, that ‘the beauty of sport is to do really with human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body’ [p.8]. I said, in talking about Suits, that the value of sport lies in the enjoyment, the value of exercising physical skills, and that this goes very deep in human nature. Maybe not everybody has this facet to their lives, but one of the things that humans do is perfect skills to an absurd and unnatural degree, and not just in sport—if you think of musicians, and typists (when we used to have typists), people can learn to do amazing things with their bodies, and people start honing and developing these skills as an end in itself. It’s a very natural thing for humans to do. Part of the Federer essay is about the beauty engendered by extreme levels of physical skill, but Foster Wallace also focuses on the mechanics of it. He has this insider’s appreciation of how very difficult this is. What you’re watching Federer and Nadal doing is at an incredibly high level, something that you only truly appreciate when you’re at the tennis court, rather than watching on television. When you watch it on television you have very little sense of how hard they’re hitting the ball, and how fast it’s coming. He points out—and this is something that interests me a lot, and was the subject of my first writing about sport—that it is all effectively unconscious when somebody hits a ball very precisely when they’ve only got 400 milliseconds, less than half a second, the time it takes you to blink twice very quickly, between the ball leaving the other opponent’s racket and getting to you. There’s no time for any conscious thought. It really is all reflexes. At the same time, he points out, Federer is a tactician—he describes one point against Nadal where Federer moves him around and then slows him down so as to open up the court for a crosscourt, and then hits a crosscourt, and it’s very intellectual—and so there’s a real puzzle there about how deliberate, conscious thought can interact with these split-second reflexes. To be honest, Wallace doesn’t answer this conundrum, but he raises it in a very acute form. He also talks about something else that’s very interesting about high level fast-sporting skills, he talks about how much time Federer seems to have. To Federer is seems as if the ball is coming slowly, he seems to have ample time to be graceful, whereas other players are just rushed. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Something Foster Wallace doesn’t talk about, something that sports science is now illuminating, is the extent to which players know where the ball is coming long before the opponent has hit it, they draw all kinds of inferences from the posture, from the angle of the opponent’s wrist, and so on, and so they’re already moving to where the ball is going to go, and they already know what kind of shot it is going to be, quite a while before it is hit. There’s a nice example of this with Desmond Douglas, who was the top British table tennis player for a long time: he was famed for having fast reactions, and could stand much closer to the table than other players, and take the ball earlier. But when sports scientists tested him, his reactions weren’t that exceptional, and it turned out his ability wasn’t based on fast eye-hand co-ordination at all: it was based purely on the ability, from his experience, to read from the posture, and other cues from his opponent, where the ball was going to be coming before it was hit. What I like about the Foster Wallace essay is that he gets underneath the surface of sport, he sees how amazing and beautiful it is that athletes can do things which most spectators don’t think much about, and take for granted. He has a philosopher’s curiosity about how such things are possible. They’re the kinds of things I’ve been writing about in my blog and want to go into more when I write my sports book."