"A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again"

It's always better to know where an essayist comes from - more so than with a novelist. Happily, in the very first essay, "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley", David Foster Wallace does exactly that.

'As a junior tennis player, I was for a time a citizen of the concrete physical world in a way the other boys weren't, I felt.'

• The area behind and below these broad curves at the seam of land and sky I could plot by eye way before I came to know infinitesimals as easements, an integral as schema. Math at a hilly Eastern school was like waking up; it dismantled memory and put it in light.
• ...there is basically nothing tall, and that weird zephyrs and stirs joined breezes and gusts and thermals and downdrafts and whatever out over Nebraska and Kansas and moved east like streams into rivers and jets and military fronts that gathered like avalanches and roared in reverse down pioneer oxtrails, toward our own personal unsheltered asses.
  
• In the odd central pocket... Midwestern life is informed and deformed by wind.
• a true religious-type wind
• the lurid jutting Berkshires of western Massachusetts
• I found I felt best physically enwebbed in sharp angles, acute bisections, shaved corners. This was environmental. Philo, Illinois, is a cockeyed grid.
• Tornadoes are omnipotent and obey no law. Force without law has no shape, only tendency and duration. I believe now that I knew all this without knowing it, as a kid.
  

'(Tennis) is billiards with balls that won't hold still. It is chess on the run. It is to artillery and airstrikes what football is to infantry and attrition.'

• The best-planned, best-hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic unlyrical problem.
• ...using stats, surface, sun, gusts, and a kind of Stoic cheer that I was regarded as a kind of physical savant, a medicine boy of wind and heat, and could play just forever, sending back moonballs baroque with spin. Antitoi, uncomplicated from the get-go, hit the everliving shit out of every round object that came within his ambit, aiming always for one of two backcourt corners. He was a Slugger; I was a Slug.
  
• I'd found a wya to sort of tack back and forth against a stiff current, holding some wide book out at my side at about 120 angle of thrust - Bayne and Pugh's The Art of the Engineer and Cheiro's Language of the Hand proved to be the best airfoils - so that through imagination and verve and stoic cheer I could not just neutralize but use an in-your-face gale for biking.
  
• ...hypnotic, a mental state at once flat and lush, numbing and yet exquisitely felt. We were young, we didn't know when to stop.
  

glabrous, detente, conferva, saurian