the roar that lets him not hear himself — "he literally could not hear himself…"
he literally could not hear himself think out there, maybe a cliché, but out there transformed, his own self transcended as he’d never escaped himself on the court
Context
What Orin is actually after under the stadium roar is escape from the sealed self: "a denial of silence," thirty thousand voices merged into one, loud enough that "he literally could not hear himself think" — the only place the self he could never get out of on a tennis court finally goes quiet. The crowd-noise is prized precisely as an anesthetic for interiority, the solipsist's brief holiday from his own head, bought with a wall of other people's undifferentiated sound. (The spectation frame — the crowd as Entertainment, choosing your master — stays entertainment-self's; landed here only as escape-from-self.) [sweep · shared-ground entertainment-self]