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

member of the Viking-Penguin team (your American publisher, formerly mine). The squads were coed, the games were loose, sloppy affairs, but even though I was pushing forty or already past it, I enjoyed reactivating my old baseball muscles and (by force of habit and temperament) always played hard. One evening, as I stood at my position in the field (third base), the batter lofted a foul ball far, far to my right. When I saw the trajectory of the ball, I understood that I had no chance of catching it, but (again, by force of habit and temperament) I went after it anyway. Urging my no longer young legs to move as quickly as they could, I ran for what felt like ten minutes, realized that yes, perhaps I did have a chance, and at the last moment, just as the ball was about to hit the ground, lunged at full extension, snagged the ball in the utmost tip of my glove, and belly-flopped onto the grass. Remember, this was a game of no account, a friendly contest between joking book editors, secretaries, receptionists, and mailroom clerks, and yet I willed myself to go after that ball from a simple desire to push myself, to see if I had it in me to catch it. I was out of breath, of course, my knees and elbows were smarting, but I felt happy, terribly and stupidly happy.
    Which is to say, I am with you. The idea is not to win but to do well, to do the best you can. Your chess match with the stranger on the ship brought you face-to-face with some demonic part of yourself, and when you saw what you had become, you recoiled in disgust. I have never had a similar revelation. I don’t think, in fact, that I have ever been as hungry to win a match of any kind as you were with that German fellow in 1965. Does it have something to do with the difference between team sports and individual sports? All through my boyhood and adolescence I played on teams (primarily baseball and basketball) but rarely competed in one-on-one activities (running, boxing, tennis). Of all the hundreds of games I participated in, I would guess my teams won and lost in roughly equal measure. Winning was always more enjoyable than losing, of course, but I can’t remember ever feeling devastated by a loss—except for the few times when I bungled a crucial play and felt responsible for letting down my teammates.
    In individual sports, however, I imagine the ego must be far more significantly engaged—and far more at risk. Hence your compulsive replaying of the chess match on that gruesome bus ride to Texas. You felt you were the better player, then proved you were, and cursed yourself for having accepted a draw. But what happens when the opposite is true, when you know you are not the better player?
    I am thinking of tennis, a sport I never spent much time with and am not very good at (awful backhand)—but which I nevertheless like to play. My father, who lived and breathed tennis, whose very existence was defined by his love of tennis (for many years, he would wake at six in the morning in order to play for a couple of hours before going to work), could still beat me most of the time when he was in his sixties and I was in my twenties. Even though I knew I probably couldn’t win, I always gave maximum effort when we played and measured my successes by how long I could keep volleys going, by how much I felt my game was improving, etc. Losses never stung. On the other hand, I have found that some victories are empty, even distasteful. About fifteen or eighteen years ago, I once played tennis with a writer friend, who turned out to be so bad at it, so tragically inept, that he didn’t manage to win a single point against me. I felt no pleasure in winning. I merely felt sorry for my poor, brave opponent, who had jumped into the deep end of the pool without knowing how to swim.
    The pleasure of competition, therefore, is most keen when the opponents are evenly matched.
With best thoughts,
Paul

April 24, 2009
    Dear Paul,
    Thank you for sending me Invisible , which I read in