All serious tennis players – from gods such as Agassi to college players like I was at the time – have to grapple with isolation. For people who are comfortable with it, pro tennis can be a refuge: they find it behind a hotel door, with headphones on in a far-flung airport and, above all, inside the white lines of the court. The downside is that the victories are often private, too. When you remove the headphones, there is probably no one around to talk to; and even if there is, you probably don’t speak the same language. We were a strange cohort: sharing courts, canteens and coaches around the world but remaining ultimately alone.
The greats in tennis often become known by their first names – Roger, Rafa, Serena – but the rest of us are known by a number, our world ranking. To a greater extent than in any other sport, world ranking determines who you play, where you play and how much money you make. Tennis players have a deep and lasting relationship with their highest ranking. (Mine was 129.)
Heinrich von Kleist, the German writer, once said that looking at a seascape by Caspar David Friedrich was like having your eyelids cut off. You were staring directly at death, at the loneliest center of the loneliest void. What could be better than that? A visitor to Friedrich’s studio, Helene von Kügelgen, suggested that the same painting would be less frightening if he put a sea monster in it. Anything to mitigate the loneliness. “Indeed, a thunderstorm would have consoled and delighted me,” she said. It was as if Friedrich had uncorked a drain at the bottom of the canvas and let everything vital spill out.
I am hopeful that years of conversation about the need to prepare well for death – medically, communally, and spiritually – translate into a sober and realistic assessment of the medical facts and a willingness to allow me to return to the very low-tech dust from which I came.
This is why I love Thoreau, because the revelation for him is not God but experience. This means that metaphor is not just an always-failed route to locating the divine-beyond-the-world, but is rather the direct route into the world itself. The imitative impulse isn’t a feint, a back door to God, but the realization that several things are true at once: meditating on an apple isn’t a way to reach Emerson’s God; the apple is the apple and it is also God, which also just means you and me.
Lillard’s story is about unmasking, yes, unlearning all the things she was taught before she was diagnosed autistic, but it’s also a story of not fitting in with one’s own family, of being poor and vulnerable, of abuse, and queerness, and art, and all the ways we try to bend ourselves to make life easier. Most importantly, it can be a guide on how to unbend, forgive ourselves and come into our own.