FOR tennis legend Roger Federer, such a religious experience is a matter of fact of life -- lives as he does in that mood all the time. Tennis, by those standards, is not a game for Federer; it is an act of meditation -- or in other words, losing one’s sense of identity, so to say, and step into a sublime state. “So much talent does he have that playing against him is almost unfair to his opponents”, another tennis writer stressed. But talking of Federer’s talent is not the purpose here. For, when religious experience is under consideration, natural talent is as if only a happenstance by which to swear. In reality, what counts is the meditative state to which most watchers of the play get transported. That is purely spiritual -- religious -- and well beyond the realm of material boundaries of the body and shorn of the consciousness of one’s physical presence. No language has ever known any word that can capture truly the nature and form and content of that ‘religious experience’. Not just the bus driver quoted by David Foster Wallace, but also almost everybody who ever watched Roger Federer play tennis -- either from the galleries or on television screens in drawing rooms -- felt that kind of inner push at the ‘religious’ level.

 

Such a sublimation! Such an exposition of an extra-ordinary and natural skill and talent in a discipline! There certainly are countless numbers of such performers in all fields across time, across geography, across cultures performing at such a sublime level -- in sports or in arts or in sciences or in literature. But when a Federer descends upon the planet, the text and texture of the religious experience changes altogether -- almost beyond an easy recognition or reference to be quoted from. Stats will often prove that countless numbers of people have achieved those kinds of standards -- at the topmost level of performance in chosen fields -- so much so that they often hit the statistical glass ceilings and tear through those in search of newer levels of demonstration of skill as well as talent. But when stats have their own top-line limitation, no performer can ever actually go beyond those levels. So, beyond that point, what matters is intensity of the spiritual experience the performer has and communicates that to others who are physically on the sidelines but emotionally right in the middle of everything.

 

In that realm of expression of human excellence, the quality of the general experience, therefore, has a religious tone and tenor -- not within easy reach of those who may be able to capture the essence of such an experience but fail to find right words to breathe it out. This is the actual essence of the ‘Federer moments’ which David Foster Wallace has been quoted as having written about. Roger Federer himself has made indirect references to such moments that are frozen in human memory despite being absolutely fluid and dynamic at the point of expression -- in words or in play. But then, he is known to stop there -- almost abruptly -- and slip into an overpowering silence whose sound is not easy for the ordinary mortals to put up with.