As Tennis Abides heads into 2025, I expect to write a great deal more about tennis and tennis coaching that lies outside of tennis played on professional tours. I am ducking into Infinite Jest again as part of this shift.

Warning Spoilers

Infinite Jest opens with Hal Incandenza’s interrogation by university officials regarding discrepancies between his incisive essays and his verbal standardized test scores.* Hal sits through this interaction silently. The reader knows his silence does not signify a lack of comprehension or interest in the events. Rather, Hal is not only trying to read each person’s expressions in the room, he is guessing at ways to portray his own calmness and happiness. Hal attempts to smile but gives off the impression of pain to his interrogators. He reverts to previous advice given by others ahead of his meeting to simply be as calm as possible.

Hal in short is trying to figure out what visage or “mask” he needs to wear to navigate the admissions process. Hal’s speculations about what other people would probably want to see from his body language reflect the phenomenon of masking. Many autistic people report that attempts to match expected patterns in conversing are difficult due to absorbing sensory information in ways that diverge from most of the population.**

I am not saying Hal is autistic. I do think his inner monologue during this opening scene is an accurate representation of the guesswork many autistic people go through during social interactions.

Other Notes:

ONANCAA is more accurate in 2024 than it was in 1996.

Uncle C.T. mentioning “Oxbridge” as well as the “trivium and quadrivium” from medieval universities both had me laughing.

“Games at language.”

*I will skip the grade inflating A+++s from the Enfield Tennis Academy because as an educator it hurts a little.

**Masking is not an idea that originated for describing attempts to fit in among autistic people. The notion of masking has old roots and has been applied in multiple contexts. I first encountered the idea in a literature class when reading “We Wear the Mask” by Paul Lawrence Dunbar.