Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Read Free Book Online Page A

concocted—vision of Japan in which one refrains from inflicting defeat on an opponent because there is something shameful in defeat and therefore something shameful in imposing defeat.
All the best,
John

April 8, 2009
    Dear John,
    I have been living in a state of gloom and sorrow these past months. It has been a season of death, a time of funerals, memorial services, and condolence letters, and even as the headlines announce the disintegration of our flawed and ragged world, these private losses have touched me far more deeply than the mayhem burning in the universe-at-large.
    On Christmas day, the suicide of the twenty-three-year-old daughter of one of my oldest friends. In February, the death of a beloved woman friend I had known since I was seventeen. And last month, the absurd death of a forty-five-year-old friend after what appeared to be a harmless fall. All women, all gone before they could live out the time allotted to most of us. I tell myself that I should know better than to feel surprised, that such is the way of the world, that we are all mortal beings and our end can come at any time, but the long view offers not the smallest shred of consolation. The heart aches. There is simply no cure for it.
    Your chess story—which is also a kind of horror story—has made me rethink what I mean by the word “competition.”
    (I haven’t played chess in years, by the way, but there was a time in my early twenties when I became immersed in it, too. It is without question the most obsessive, most mentally damaging game invented by man. After a while, I found myself dreaming about chess moves in my sleep—and decided that I had to stop playing or else go mad.)
    When I used the phrase “the pleasures of competition,” I think I was referring to the sense of release that comes from giving yourself wholly to a game, the beneficial effect on both body and mind caused by absolute concentration on a particular task at a particular moment, the sense of being “outside yourself,” temporarily relieved of the burden of self-consciousness. Winning and losing are necessary but secondary factors, the excuse one needs in order to make a maximum effort to play well—for without maximum effort, there can be no real pleasure.
    Exercise for the sake of exercise has always bored me. Sit-ups and push-ups, jogging around the track “to stay in shape,” lifting weights, tossing around a medicine ball do not have the same salutary effect produced by competition. By trying to win the game you are playing, you forget that you are running and jumping, forget that you are actually getting a healthy dose of exercise. You have lost yourself in what you are doing, and for reasons I don’t fully understand, this seems to bring intense happiness. There are other transcendent human activities, of course—sex being one of them, making art another, experiencing art yet another, but the fact is that the mind sometimes wanders during sex—which is not always transcendent!—making art (think: writing novels) is filled with doubts, pauses, and erasures, and we are not always able to give our full attention to the Shakespeare sonnet we are reading or the Bach oratorio we are listening to. If you are not fully in the game you are playing, however, you are not truly playing it.
    We mustn’t overlook the question of fatigue. If your body tires in the middle of a game, you lose your concentration and your desire to win (that is, the ability to make a maximum effort). That is why tough and demanding competitive sports are played by young people, why most professional athletes are finished by the time they reach their midthirties. But there is a definite pleasure in trying to push yourself beyond your perceived limits, of continuing to make a maximum effort even though your resources are spent.
    I vividly remember my last stab at sporting glory. Twenty-plus years ago, I played in the New York Publishers Softball League once a week in Central Park as a