Eschaton

Still only about 350 pages into David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest and I'm really starting to drag and find excuses not to pick it up...

That is until yesterday, when I hit the chapter on the game Eschaton--it is worth trudging through the first 350 pages of this book if for nothing more than this chapter. In this chapter, a bunch of child prodigy tennis players around the ages of 12-14 meet up for their version of a game called Eschaton which is a game of world domination that involves tennis courts, territories and countries, nuclear missiles in the form of tennis balls, beanies that signify different states of activity--particularly a fall into complete worldly and political chaos and armageddon--and handfuls of early teens.

All the kids involved are wicked smart children, the game a slow-moving one that involves strategy and carefulness.

However, when one kid decides to bomb another child in the head with a tennis ball (opening up the question of whether someone outside of the actual game board can become an actual part OF the interior of the game), all chaos erupts and the game spirals out of control--the armageddon beanie's propeller is spun, and the court erupts into a madness of kids beating on each other, pegging each other with tennis balls, exploding computers, vomiting everywhere.

It is one of the funniest and most unexpected moments in a book that I've read in a long while.

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