Finishing Eschaton

I am still, as stated earlier, reading Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. I have decided that it’s not a novel that I am continuing to read because I like it, though I do. I’ve given up on a lot of likeable novels. There is also the allure of actually finishing a “cool” and “important” novel, and therefore having a license to drone on about it to everyone within earshot. That’s not been a deciding factor ever since I gave up reading Gravity’s Rainbow when it came out when I was in high school. That book was immediately made cool by some sort of critical osmosis that I could never quite fathom. I chucked it after about 54 pages of humor (I think) that I simply didn’t get.

I have decided that, unlike most other books I read, Infinite Jest and the reading of it is a vocation. I can’t leave the book alone. I am quite behind in the reading schedule suggested on the Infinite Summer website — I have only today gotten through the big Eschaton section.

Eschaton, in IJ, is a group game, rather like Risk, where the players, who are students at a tennis academy in Boston, act out a global conquest and dominance sort of game out on some unused tennis courts. The students are divided up into assorted nations, and tennis balls are imaginary 5-megaton nuclear warheads. In this particular session of the game, things… go awry. Suddenly, the players of the game forget the difference between “game” and reality. It doesn’t end well.

There is no such game in real life as Eschaton, not that I know of. If it does exist, I will avoid it.