Choice made irrelevant — happiness through the foreclosure of alternatives
echoes
From: Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness
- Early text: Joyce "will pay with the regretless cheer of a man
for whom issues of choice became irrelevant long ago"; "He will say he is
happy and mean it." [closing ¶] [e-text]; and the footnote meditation: can one
"choose" what one was "forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in" before
the age of choosing? — resolved not by argument but by love: "it’s the very
surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place"
[fn 24]. (Paired with the title's promise of "certain stuff about choice,
freedom, limitation, joy … and human completeness".)
- IJ echo: IJ's preoccupation with choice, will, and the freedom that
comes from giving away freedom — Schtitt's and the AA program's shared
logic that liberation lies in submission to a discipline rather than in
keeping one's options open; the Marathe/Steeply debates on choosing what to
give oneself away to. Joyce as the living proof-of-concept: happiness bought
by the foreclosure of choice.
- Weight: shared-preoccupation