Big Buddy sickbed sermon on repetition

texture · 3 Nov YDAU, ~1730h

• When: 3 November YDAU, the twice-weekly Big Buddy interval before dinner
• What: From his sickbed (vaporizer chugging, a Little Buddy holding Kleenex at the ready), Troeltsch delivers his Big Buddy quartet an earnest minilecture on tennis pedagogy: that the point of endless mechanical repetition before ~14 is to sink strokes below consciousness into "the machine-language of the muscles," freeing the head for the later character-and-concentration work. His fullest sustained speech — competent, even eloquent, on the theory of a game he cannot himself play at a high level.