Snippets

1.

[From a conversation with James Harding.] There are two types of neurotic person. People who walk quickly: they're constantly being held up by slow-walkers, tourists, etc., they can never go as fast as they like, they can never relax or be free. People who walk slowly: they're always being overtaken by fast-walkers, people whose lives seem to have an urgency and meaning that theirs don't, they're anxious about getting in the way. There is nobody who walks 'at an average speed'. Dialectics of neurotic walkers: it takes both types to make each other.

2.

There's pleasure in the gaps between things: making them line up, or closing them, although you never can. The pleasure of sport is about the gap between vision and its accomplishment. To be a good sportsman (I was thinking of tennis: "chess on the run") you have to know what you're trying to do, at tactical and strategic levels: you have to have vision - comprehension, prediction, imagination; but you also have to be able to do it, it's no good saying I want to hit it there if you can't. Some people are better at one than the other, but you have to do both (that's why chess is not a sport). The way I've described it seems Cartesian: mind + body. But it's really the opposite: sport needs the whole of you, the pleasure comes from making yourself whole.