Tennis and the feral prodigy
Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play.
Context
From Hal's voice-over for Mario's contest cartridge: the prescribed escape from the three-generation talent curse is dissociation so total that playing becomes dreaming — the theme's one sanctioned, engineered dream-state, built on purpose and awake. The waking pole against which the scene's actual dream-pedagogy (p. 175, in the spine) sits.