1.
As far as I’m aware, Mary Shelley is the first person ever to give serious attention to the idea that the human race might be headed toward extinction without prospect of redemption. She gave this idea imaginative force with a lesser known novel, The Last Man, published in 1826 while she was still in her twenties. Presciently, she imagined that we will succumb to the ravages of disease. She did the heavy work for us, pushing back against the Church’s magical attachment to immortality, and dragging the rest of us along with her kicking and screaming. The kicking and screaming stopped on August 6th, 1945 when we confirmed that not only is our extinction possible, it will likely be self-inflicted. Environmentalists like Rachel Carson only added force to that discovery by expanding the range of possible endings we can deploy to draw our collective story to its close.
Now, in 2022, we feel more acutely than ever before (and simultaneously) the threat of these three possible endings—pathogens, weapons, environmental destruction. It is with considerable relief, then, that I can turn to Geoff Dyer who has no apparent interest in ultimate endings but has a few acute observations about those endings we’re all apt to encounter in our personal experience. As for ultimate endings, I take my cue from Dyer who ends his book with an account of a recent party he attended where he took some hits of DMT and passed 15 minutes drifting in eternity where endings have no relevance in any event. In lieu of DMT, I swallowed a THC gummy from the shop across the street and savoured the ending of Dyer’s book while offering up a personal fuck you to ultimate endings.
2.
The Last Days of Roger Federer is what I would call a “stage of life” book insofar as it most concerns the experience of someone at Geoff Dyer’s stage of life. Born in 1958, he has almost arrived at the age traditionally associated with retirement. While he has cranked out an impressive bibliography, the day will inevitably come when the writing stops. Maybe he loses his marbles. Maybe he loses his interest. Maybe he loses the energy to sustain the effort a book requires. Whatever the reason, it is a certainty that the writing will stop and whatever immediately precedes that stoppage will be his last work. Maybe this is it.
From time to time throughout the book, Dyer reminds himself that he’s older than he used to be. As a student, he used to stay up half the night, drinking, getting high, and waking fresh in the morning. Now, he goes to bed at sensible times and makes a point of abstaining from alcohol at least three nights of every week. He loves to play tennis but both his knees are shot and, as he confesses in the final pages, he hasn’t served overhand for years because his shoulder is a mess. There’s a funny episode where he visits a practitioner of Chinese medicine (who turns out to be Caucasian). On the first visit with an elbow complaint, the decrepit doctor manipulates his wrist and, miraculously, the elbow is better. But on the second visit, the doctor’s skill is no match for a body that, by tiny increments, has passed beyond the threshold of repair. A few years ago, Dyer suffered a minor stroke, and while he fully recovered, it sent him a message he understood loud and clear.
I’m five years younger than Dyer which means that, while I’m not yet prepared to behave as if my mind and body have hard limitations, I recognize that the day is fast approaching when I will have to make the necessary concessions. When I swivel sideways getting out of bed, my joints aren’t as supple as they used to be. Sometimes a word eludes me. And occasionally I’ll set out on what I intend as a long photo walk only to turn back because I have a desperate need to pee. These are not the complaints of a young man.
3.
Two days ago, half way through the book, I’m down at the gym doing my utmost to frustrate the grim reaper. I’m on the stationary bicycle (technically, a unicycle) playing my usual game. I pretend it’s the zombie apocalypse and I’m riding for all I’m worth to escape the hordes pursuing me on their own stationary bicycles. Despite the peril, I listen to a podcast: Nahlah Ayed on CBC’s Ideas interviewing two nihilist philosophers, Tracy Llanera and James Tartaglia, who do their best to flee their own zombie hordes. In their case, the zombie hordes are infected by received notions of ultimate meaning.
Notions of ultimacy undergird Western religion so, for example, our lives have meaning to the extent that we align our believing and conduct with the precepts of the Church. While secular humanism has rebelled against religious traditions with appeals to reason and science and the kinds of solutions (both ethical and technological) that these promise, secular humanism is merely the opposite side of the same coin in that it grounds its claims in similar notions of ultimacy. A secular life ends up being a quest for meaning which, ironically, puts it in the position of standing on John Bunyan’s toes while his pilgrim embarks on an allegorical quest for Christian perfection. Whether we answer a call to be more like Christ or to be more like our latest guru of personal excellence, the result is the same. We hold ourselves to an impossible standard then chastise ourselves for failing to meet it. If a parent did this to a child, we’d call it psychological abuse. Yet we allow our religious and secular institutions to do this to us all the time.
Instead of chasing meaning—striving to be first in our class, scrabbling for the plum jobs at the pinnacle of the corporate pyramid, teaching our children that they live inside a domed Darwinian contest, taking mindfulness retreats where we try to be the most integrated meditator in the room—we might find our lives vastly improved if we threw notions of ultimacy and meaning into the trash bin and devoted ourselves to things like being kind, to being good enough, and, when the occasion suggests itself, to slacking off.
Geoff Dyer is the last person I would expect to wear a label that positions him in the wild pageant of Western thought, and he never applies such labels to himself. Nevertheless, I note in his writing a certain affinity for my nihilist friends at least to the extent that he exhibits absolutely no hint of an inkling of a wisp of a concern for ultimate meanings while exhibiting a firm commitment to slacking off.
4.
Dyer’s book appears in four sections each with numbered sub-sections. In form, it reminds me of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The difference is that in Ludwig Wittgenstein’s book subsection 1 lays down the preconditions for the terms that appear in subsection 2 without which subsection 2 could never be written. In the case of Dyer’s book, there is no such logical progression. In fact, I would suggest that Dyer doesn’t have a logical bone in his body. Apart from his collections of shorter pieces (e.g. Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, See/Saw) which don’t give him space to really get going, his longer non-fiction is marked by an aleatory meandering style. If a psychoanalyst were to put Dyer on a couch, the free association games would begin before the psychoanalyst had even started the clock. His patron saint is Laurence Sterne whose Tristram Shandy is the gold standard of seemingly random digression. Dyer’s book is the anti-Tractatus.
The Last Days of Roger Federer opens with Jim Morrison and The Doors singing “The End” which is strange since a) we were expecting something about tennis, and b) this is the beginning. Speaking of singing, Bob Dylan tells us “This ain’t the end” in his song “Tangled Up Blue.” But back to Jim Morrison, there’s a barbershop in Venice Beach (where Dyer now lives) that displays a poster of Morrison in all his hirsute glory. Only in subsection 4 do we have our first mention of tennis: Andy Murray announces his retirement at the Australian Open in January of 2019. Which reminds Dyer of George Best’s 1972 announcement of retirement from football. Which in turn prompts a reflection in subsection 6 on how retirement differs for ordinary working class people like Dyer’s father. And so it goes, introducing jazz luminaries in the last days of waning careers, writers who fade in a haze of alcohol and cigarettes or simply lose their touch, great artists forced by commercial necessity to tumble down the long slope of mediocrity, and washed up philosophers (most notably Nietzsche who lingered for a decade in a state of insanity before kicking off to meet his non-existent god). And then there’s Roger. In and out of retirement so often, it makes your head spin.
5.
Although I’ve suggested that Dyer doesn’t concern himself with ultimacy, I don’t mean to imply that he’s incapable of thinking seriously about his own mortality. Let me point you in the direction of his 3rd novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, in which, as you can see for yourself, Death has a titular role. However, there, as here, the force of Death is blunted. Jeff Atman visits Varanasi to write a travel piece and there he sees the pyre by the Manikarnika Ghat where bodies are publicly cremated. He extends his visit from days to months to years, gradually shedding his Western anxieties around Death and adopting a barely articulable something else.
In The Last Days of Roger Federer, Dyer blunts the force of Death by pointing out (Dyer is never explicit about anything so I’m the one who does the pointing) that Death isn’t really what makes modern Westerners anxious. We feel more anxious about the period sandwiched between our death and a full-blown productive adulthood. The dominant religion of our day teaches us that we will find meaning through work, achievement, excellence, aspiration, celebrity, assets, followers, click-throughs. But barring accident or catastrophic medical emergency, there comes a time in every life when these sources of meaning are unsustainable (assuming they ever were in the first place). We have a last day at work. We seal our last deal. We play our last game. We write our last book. We shoot our last photo. We take our last trip. We see our last concert. We have our last dinner out.
What we don’t do is die, at least not yet. If we have framed our life, however subtly, as a quest for meaning, then when those things that confer meaning are no longer possible, we risk turning the last days of our lives into a horror story. As I’ve already said, Dyer is never explicit about anything, so he offers no answer to this challenge. But he does offer his example. We see it there in his relaxed easy manner. We feel it there in a sensibility that runs through all his writing. Sometimes good enough is better than the best there is. And sometimes a slacker offers us more of substance than the most energetic motivational voices.