"Pressure such as one could not imagine, now that to maintain you must win. Now that winning is the expected. And all alone, in the hotels and the airplanes, with any other player you could speak to of the pressure to exist wanting to beat you..."
"Hence the suicides. The burn-out. The drugs, the self-indulging, the spoilage."
The passage is truly about pressure in tennis but I wonder about the pressure on the writer, DFW - for there is yet another mention of suicide. I had promised that I would log the mentions of suicide but then I kind of stopped, thinking that the subject would spoil the book for me - that the book and the talent of the writer were bigger than the writer's suffering and death.
But here it is again. DFW spoke of the monitoring of "ideation" at Ennet House (p.594). I wonder about the depth of ideation in DFW's work.
I have asked this question before - even though I don't like the question (I sound like the playwright whose narrow view is that the book is one big marijuana trip): is the whole book ideation?
I guess I won't really have this answer til I get to its end.
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