Roger Federer & profound frivolity

 Speaking of *frivolity, and instantiating it...

Got a late-night text just before drifting off last night from my old friend in Huntsville, a reading recommendation: The Last Days of Roger Federer and other endings by Geoff Dyer. "Trust me, it's right up your alley."

I'm not much into tennis, but I do usually trust him and his biblio-advice. He's the guy who told me, when we were undergrads, that I should read Walker Percy and John Updike. I think I give as good as I get in that department, I told him about the Richards (Ford and Powers).

I do wonder, though, how in his mind I've come to represent an affinity for endings. That might be ominous, in the year we've both turned 65 (on consecutive days in February). But when someone who's held your acquaintance for so long--we celebrated our 21st birthdays together on consecutive nights in February 1978--says something like that, you should probably listen and ponder.

That's what the review headline says Dyer does in this book, "ponders the twilight." 

Too bad my friend won't be pondering the twilight with me and two other old pals in Kentucky later this week, we're renewing our now-annual tradition of meeting up at a mutually-accessible venue in August for minor-league baseball. This year it's Lexington (last year Huntsville, the year before Asheville, the year before Chattanooga, the year before Nashville), where the Legends share Wild Health Field with the Genomes. Really. 

And then we're hitting a portion of the Bourbon Trail. So we could use a designated driver or two. Unfortunately another of us (the one who would have shared the drive up with me) also had to bail, due to an urgent health concern. Like it or not we're at that age. But that's why I like these trips so much, with these guys I now so seldom see: it's a bit like peeling back the years and feeling like a know-it-all, semi-mortal grad student again. 

But, back to Geoff Dyer and my alley. The reviewer generally likes the book, though she says Dyer might be too much in touch with his inner 14-year old. Not even grad school age. The lines I particularly notice (or illustrate):

• “I was conscious, even as I bought a ticket and made plans to go, of a tendency to do things one time too many.” As Younger Daughter used to say: "But I like 'too much'."
• “A benefit of writing is that it makes one less susceptible to the numerous irritations and calamities of the world beyond the desk,” Dyer writes. “It insulates from bad weather; it’s a shield against Covid and Trump (against thinking about them all the time).” Exactly. Writing things down is like shucking a load. And in the age of digitized everything, if you publish the things you've shucked you can retrieve them if you want to. Or not. You can just move on and think about something else. Maybe that's the "alley" my friend has in mind, the grab-bag alley of daily dawn musings, reflections caught and released.
• * He quotes Nietzsche saying, “The profoundest mind must also be the most frivolous one.

Well alright then. I just ordered up Roger Federer from the Nashville Public Library. We'll see. 

(Oh by the way, AC, I had an unpleasant dream last night I'm pretty sure your text triggered: I was at an epistemology conference before a hostile audience, entirely unprepared to comment on an abstruse technical paper about the Problem of the Criterion or such. Thanks for that. And sincere thanks for the reading recommendation, and for reminding me of WJ's withering comment on erkentnisstheorie and the "belligerent young enthusiasm" and  "gray-plaster temperament of our bald-headed young Ph.D. s, boring each other at seminaries, writing those direful reports of literature in the "Philosophical Review" and elsewhere... Faugh!")