Agape is basically one long monologue delivered by an “I” who, if not actually Gaddis, is very close to him, who, (in the trope heavily deployed in JR), near dying, sees the window closing, yet still hasn’t delivered his opus (in this case a study of the player piano and its metonymic significance as a symbol for the death of Art in the mechanical age). Papers, clippings, index cards, volumes stacked and scattered, a body failing, a mind that knows its period of peak-performance is decades past . . . I’ve heard the thing denounced as utterly unreadable, but its unreadability is to me the heart-destroying point: Gaddis never wrote the work that in snippets appears as the failed effort of various characters throughout his actual corpus . . . but here’s the paradox: he spent his life in pursuit of a prize that he never could grasp, and yet that “failure” left several masterpieces of 20^th Century Literature in a desperate sojourn’s wake—while writing the book he never wrote: in other words, Gaddis was writing, and what he wrote was glorious, at least from this reader’s vantage. Though there never was a consummation, there was constant victory, if of another sort, while being present, alive, and while—presumably you see where this is going—playing the game.

I saw LeBron James have his shot rejected in the post twice in a single game this year, something I can’t remember seeming possible as little as two years ago. He isn’t meeting as many fast-break attempts at the rim these days, and certain lay-ups, floaters, scoops, hopeless head-of-steam charges into the lane that seem only intent on drawing contact, limp feints which would have been hyperphysical dunks not more than three years back. No one’s said this yet, but it seems to me that the most physically gifted athlete of his generation has quietly inched over his peak.[10]

One theory addressing the decline in frequency of LeBron James’ once-signature chase-down rejections of dunk- and lay-up attempts goes that since actual outcomes started to matter with the window-closing creep of Time, he started, for the first time in his career, to consciously conserve energy for the moments that bore directly thereupon.