What if you went out to play a game of tennis and just kept on playing tennis, never stopping? "In spite of the tennis" is a line that recurs throughout Lucky's monologue in
Waiting for Godot, an exhaustive demonstration of thought—of individual human existence—as nothing but a discontinuous stream of disparate impressions, structured not by meaning or beginning and end, but rather by arbitrary time. I thought about Beckett while reading
Xan Brooks's despairing live blog of yesterday's Wimbledon match between
John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, who took two sets apiece yesterday before their match was suspended due to darkness in the fifth set, with each player having held serve to the tune of 59 games apiece. They resumed this afternoon; as of this writing,
they're still playing. [
UPDATE, ten minutes later: It's over! Isner wins, 6-4, 3-6, 6-7, 7-6, 70-68. Thanks for waiting til we got this post up, guys! Have a banana for cramping.]
