The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. Yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.
—p. 696, on suicide
Te Occidere Possunt Sed Te Edere Non Possunt Nefas Estnote
—old Enfield Tennis Academy motto, Headmaster James Incandenza
Do not ask WHY
If you dont want to DIE
Do like your TOLD
If you want to get OLD (sic)
—Graffiti in men's bathroom of Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House, on the subject of recovery programs like Alcoholics Anonymous
Do not underestimate objects!
—Enfield Tennis Academy guru Lyle
It now lately sometimes seemed like a kind of black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe. God or Satan, politics or grammar, topology or philately—the object seemed incidental to this will to give oneself away, utterly.
—Hal Incandenza
LIFE IS LIKE TENNIS
THOSE WHO SERVE
BEST USUALLY WIN
—church announcement board in Weston, Massachusetts
In his coat and skallycap-over-scarf on Watertown Center's underground Gray Line platform, when the first hot loose load fell out into the baggy slacks and down his leg and out around his high heel — he still had only his red high heels with the crossing straps, which the slacks were long enough to mostly hide — Poor Tony closed his eyes against the ants fornicating up and down his arms' skinny length and screamed a soundless interior scream of utter and soul-scalded woe.
—Poor Tony Krause on a Boston train
People, then, who are sad, but who can’t let themselves feel sad, or express it, the sadness, I’m trying rather clunkily to say, these persons may strike someone who’s sensitive as somehow just not quite right. Not quite there. Blank. Distant. Muted. Distant. Spacey was an American term we grew up with. Wooden. Deadened. Disconnected. Distant. Or they may drink alcohol or take other drugs. The drugs both blunt the real sadness and allow some skewed version of the sadness some sort of expression, like throwing someone through a living room window out into the flowerbeds she’d so very carefully repaired after the last incident.
—Avril Incandenza
Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.
Here is how to spray yourself down exactly once with Lemon Pledge, the ultimate sunscreen, then discover that when you go out and sweat into it it smells like close-order skunk.
Here is how to take nonnarcotic muscle relaxants for the back spasms that come from thousands of serves to no one.
Here is how to weep in bed trying to remember when your torn blue ankle didn’t hurt every minute.
—"Tennis and the Feral Prodigy", narrated by Hal Incandenza and filmed by Mario Incandenza
