A dedication comes first, to Alisa, Keene and Jamie, “of course.” Then James Carse sets down the claim everything else will grow from: there are at least two kinds of games. A finite game is played in order to win; an infinite game is played in order to keep the play going. A finite game has to end, and it ends when the players agree that someone has won. Not the referees and not the crowd: if the players do not agree, the game is not over, however forcibly they are carried off the field. And no one can be made to play. Anyone who has to play is not really playing, a principle that holds for both kinds of game and keeps coming back. A finite game also needs edges. It starts at a set moment and stops at one, it is played on marked ground, and its players are chosen. The Second World War had such edges: the opponents agreed not to bomb Heidelberg or Paris and left Switzerland outside the contest. When Sherman cut his path of fire from Atlanta to the sea he ignored the edges so completely that, for many, that war was never legitimately won and has never quite ended. Not everyone may play for or against the New York Yankees, or simply decide to be an electrician; permission always belongs to whoever grants it. Without a fixed membership there can be no clear winner, which is why nobody can say who won the French Revolution. The world, Carse observes, is crowded with these markings, and its people are sorted by what they are eligible for. Only one player or team can win, but everyone else can still be ranked, which is why so many compete hard for a vice presidency, knowing they will never reach the top.
An infinite game shares exactly one feature with a finite one: it, too, can only be played freely. Everything else is reversed. No infinite player can name the moment their game started, and none of them minds, because it is not bounded by time; its only aim is to keep everyone playing. It has no marked ground and no list of who may enter. Its time is not the world’s clock but time the play makes for itself, so there is no saying how long it has lasted or where it happens, though it may hold any number of worlds inside it. Finite games can be played inside an infinite game, never the other way round, and an infinite player treats any win or loss as a moment in something larger. The rules are where the difference sharpens. A finite game’s rules are published before play and agreed to, and that agreement is their only authority: not a senate’s vote, not the heroes who once kept them, not a prophet on a mountain. They cannot change in the middle of play, or a different game is being played. Start behind the white line, pay your debts by the end of the month, drive in the right lane. An infinite game’s rules must change, and they change whenever the play is threatened by someone winning. Carse compares them to the grammar of a living language, which keeps shifting so that people can go on talking, set against the fixed rules of a debate, whose whole purpose is to bring someone’s speech to a stop. The changes answer real threats, exhaustion, the loss of resources, hostile outsiders, death, by folding each limit into the game itself. So the finite player stays inside the lines, while the infinite player takes the lines themselves as something to play with.
If finite play is free, why does it so often feel compulsory? Partly because roles come with expectations. No one is forced to stay a lawyer, a rodeo performer or a kundalini yogi, but no one can stay one while doing whatever they please. Partly because every move is made to win, so every move starts to feel necessary. Partly because the prizes look like life itself: even a slave who takes up the demanded role chooses it at a terrible price, and the very existence of the threat admits that the oppressed must consent to be oppressed. All the limits of finite play, Carse concludes, are limits we set ourselves. To play seriously we have to veil our freedom from ourselves. His example is an actress playing Ophelia, so good that the audience no longer sees a woman playing a part, only Ophelia, yet never for a second forgetting that she is acting, while the audience never forgets that it is watching. Every role works this way: mother, teacher, light-heavyweight. The question is not whether we wear masks but whether we will ever admit that we chose them. Veiling is a contradiction, since we freely set our freedom aside, and Carse borrows a thought of Sartre’s: to believe is to know that you believe, and knowing it is already not quite believing. Infinite players take up roles with full energy but without the seriousness, knowing a mask is a mask. Seriousness, he says, belongs to scripts: we are more solemn with a police officer in uniform than with one halfway into it. Playfulness is not triviality. It means meeting each other as free persons with nothing decided in advance, open to surprise and to real consequence. It is seriousness that fears consequence, and presses for an ending it already has in mind.
Carse names the two styles. Finite play, aimed at a conclusion and performed before an audience, is theatrical. Infinite play, which keeps the future open and makes every script useless, is dramatic. Taking on the role of mother is theatre; choosing to be one is drama. A finite game is dramatic only while it lasts, because its outcome is still unknown; once it is over, everyone looks back and sees how each free move led inevitably to this winner. So every finite player wants to be a Master Player, trained so well that nothing can surprise them, playing as though the game were already in the past. Surprise is the weapon. Catching an opponent unprepared is how you win, which makes surprise in finite play the past defeating the future, and makes every finite move a kind of deception: feints, distractions, misdirections, mystifications. Infinite players play expecting to be surprised, and if surprise ever became impossible their play would stop. For them surprise is the future overcoming the past. Each one reveals a new beginning in what had seemed settled, so the past itself keeps changing. This openness has nothing to do with frankness. It is the openness of being exposed, of a self that is still growing rather than one that has always been. From this comes one of the book’s sharpest distinctions. Getting ready so that nothing can surprise you is training; getting ready to be surprised is education. Training treats the past as closed and the future as something to close, and ends in a final definition of the self. Education keeps finding what was left unfinished in the past and carries it on.
The prize of a finite game is a title, the public acknowledgment that you won that particular game. Titles exist for others to notice, and because they are meant to be timeless, societies work hard to keep them remembered: the hats of dead cardinals hang from cathedral ceilings, great athletes’ numbers are retired, victories are carved in stone or kept in perpetual flames. Death means something different in each kind of game. A finite game ends with a terminal move that kills the opponent as a player and leaves them with no title at all. One can be dead in life, having given up all striving, as a defeated person does by resignation or a mystic does on purpose. Or one can be alive in death, like pharaohs buried with their offices and their servants, or soldiers declared unforgettable even when their names are lost. What winners gain is less an afterlife than an afterworld, an everlasting audience for their titles. When life itself becomes the prize, for the slave who keeps a life by giving it away or the patient who spends a fortune on staying alive, life is no longer lived but won, and finite play turns against itself. Immortality is a role one can never step out of; Carse quotes a philosopher who found the promise of an eternal soul about as stirring as news that his appendix would be kept forever in a bottle. Infinite players die, and they die in the course of play, not at its end, offering their deaths so that others can go on. They play as mortals, toward the open, and their play is full of laughter: not laughter at those who lost, but with those for whom an expected ending has suddenly opened. Their paradox is that they play best when they are least needed, and their joy lies in starting things that will outlast them unfinished. Winners carry titles; infinite players have only their names, given at birth before they have done anything, so that to call each other by name is to leave the future open between them.
Titles come with ceremony: forms of address, the subjects one may raise with an admiral or a mother superior, whether one bows, kneels or stands in silence. Each courtesy marks a contest one has agreed is closed. That is what power is. It needs resistance, a closed field and a fixed span of time, and it can be measured only once the game is over: until the last hours of the count in 1948, many Americans thought Truman the weaker candidate. Power is not what wins a game; it is what winning buys, and it is bestowed afterwards by an audience. Floods, inflation and genetic disease are real, but we are not their losers. Reality sets the terms of play; it is not the opponent. Once death is accepted as certain, the struggle is no longer against being mortal; it is carried on as someone mortal. Against power Carse sets strength. Power settles the past and shuts it; strength takes the past along, unsettled, into what comes next. Power belongs to a few and can be counted. Anyone at all can have strength, and strength is the freedom to let others do as they wish in the course of play. Infinite play cannot prevent evil, and evil is its end: infinite play falling into a silence nobody hears. When Europeans reached North America the people there spoke as many as ten thousand languages; nearly all are gone. The Nazis demanded a title without a contest and could get it only by silencing the Jews, unnoticed even by the people who ran the machinery of death. Evil, Carse says, never sets out as evil. It begins in the wish to wipe evil out, to tidy history toward a final ending. No one’s history is anyone else’s to finish. So infinite players do not try to destroy evil in others. They look for it in themselves, in the very urge to destroy it somewhere else.
No one can play a game alone. Carse moves from the game to the society around it, starting from the claim that there is no self outside a community: we become who we are by relating to others, who are themselves relating, so our lives are fluid. In a Zen image he borrows, we are not the stones in the stream but the stream. Continuity, for Carse, depends on the capacity to change. Bismarck called politics the art of the possible, meaning the possible inside fixed limits, and an early American president imagined one generation learning war so that the next could learn engineering and the one after could paint. Infinite players are engaged in politics while holding no political program. They ask not how much freedom the limits allow but how freely we put the limits there. They see that no country can fight a war until it has found another willing to agree on the terms: to have an enemy at all, you must first get someone to agree to be yours. Seen this way politics is theatre with a known last scene, and the United States did not so much lose its war in Southeast Asia as lose its audience for it, leaving its soldiers without the homecoming they had been promised. So infinite players turn attention away from what others feel they must do, toward why they feel they must. They separate society, everything we do under some form of public constraint, from culture, whatever we freely do together without anyone directing it, in the historian Burckhardt’s sense. Society, Carse says, is a kind of culture that keeps contradicting itself, a freely made arrangement for forgetting that it was freely made.
A society is one large finite game holding many smaller ones. Schools hand out ranked awards that qualify their graduates for higher games, colleges, professional schools, the professions, and families train their members like a team. A society guards its borders, its citizenship and its enshrined past; its bureaucracies exist to verify everyone’s entitlements; its monuments honour heroes of victories, not defeats, so Foch has a statue and Pétain does not, Lincoln and not Jefferson Davis, Lenin and not Trotsky. Patriotism in all its forms keeps the whole powerful so that the prizes inside it stay safe. Culture is the infinite game. It has no borders, treats its past as an unfinished history rather than a destiny, and lives by deviation, and the variations that matter are the ones that let the familiar be seen as unfamiliar. Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony cannot be written twice. Society keeps such works as trophies; culture hears them as moves that invite the originality of others. Culture is not the owner of a tradition but the tradition itself, alive. To make titles visible, a society uses property. The thief, Carse notes, is not after your watch but your title to it, which is exactly the case the Artful Dodger puts to Oliver Twist, and force can restrain him but never make him respect the title. We do not drive through an intersection because the light changes, only when it changes: law is powerful because people obey it, not the other way round. So property has to perform. It must look like fair compensation, taking up conspicuous space, large estates and free movement, while the poor are hemmed into narrow districts. And it must be visibly consumed, in leisure: the winners of a big match are carried on shoulders as if helpless, monarchs ride in litters and the rich in limousines, and the greatest names get monuments that stand in the way of traffic and strollers. Wealth, to an infinite player, is something staged rather than something owned.
So societies come to depend on their poietai, Plato’s word for makers of every kind: poets, storytellers, sculptors, inventors, anyone original. A police officer beside every pickpocket is impossible, and slipping the Dodger a coin will not stop him wanting yours. It works better to turn the thieves into an audience for the theatre of wealth, and that takes artists. Carse asks what Nazism would have been without its set designers and filmmakers, and notes that even Plato’s austere Republic fills up with painters, musicians and makers of finery. But makers are dangerous, because they, more than anyone, tend to remember what a society has forgotten, that it is a culture. Hence the ambivalence: socialist realism in the Soviet Union, the lines Plato’s poets may not cross, wars fought as a way of silencing a society’s own poets, Alexander and Napoleon taking their poets along to applaud. Another defence is to turn art into property. The great New York museums carry the names of Carnegie, Frick, Rockefeller, Guggenheim, Whitney, Morgan and Lehman, and such buildings, Carse says, keep the public safe from art more than they keep art safe from the public. What unsettles a society most is not art against it but art that ignores its lines altogether and invites everyone back into play; generals can bear art that opposes their war more easily than art that shows war itself as something made up, comic or pointless. Real art makes possibilities, not objects, and it continues in whoever beholds it. Artists cannot be trained: you can attend school already an artist, but never to turn into one. That is why poets never quite fit. They see a society’s roles as theatre, its clothes as costumes, its crises as arranged.
None of this means tearing society down, only removing its air of necessity. Infinite players keep rules, remembering that rules express agreement rather than compel it. Here Carse sets out the image the whole book turns on: boundaries are what make a society, and a horizon is what makes a culture. A boundary is where opposing forces meet. You cannot cross it without resistance, which is why patriotism, needing enemies before it can offer protection from them, is warlike by nature, and why trying to hold every horizon inside one boundary is evil. A horizon is a matter of sight. You cannot look at it; it is simply where seeing stops, and nothing in it limits you except the incompleteness of your own seeing. You never reach it. Walk toward it and you only have a new one. Whoever lives this way is never anywhere in particular, always on the way. The Renaissance, for Carse, was a horizon of this kind: not a period but a people, with no boundary and therefore no enemy, still open to anyone who takes up its way of renewing sight, and changed by each newcomer as a family is changed by each birth. A people has nothing to defend and no one to attack, because my freedom does not require you to lose yours. States, by contrast, need enemies to know who they are; Hegel thought a long peace would corrupt nations the way a sea grows foul without wind. War serves identity, not safety. Infinite players oppose war within their own nation, meeting arms with laughter, vision and surprise, and reminding everyone that the limit is always in our seeing, never in what is seen. Plato wanted his poets to lead citizens toward reason without their noticing; true poets want nothing but noticing, and behind Plato the metaphysician Carse sees Plato the poet, inviting readers to play. The poet, he ends, can die but never kill, while an abstract doctrine cannot die and does the killing.
Then a bold first sentence, as Carse turns from the crowd to the single person: I am the genius of myself. Genius here means origin. It is I who think, not my mind; I who act, not my will. To speak as a genius is to say words for the first and only time. A trained dog offers a paw without greeting anyone, and a machine can produce words without addressing them to anyone. Words become words only when we give them up to a listener, who becomes the genius of what they hear, and that exchange makes speech that invites more speech. As geniuses we do not only look, we see. Carse glances at what surrounds him as he writes, gulls circling on currents no one can see, the cat on his desk, an ambulance siren far off, and admits that he was looking for an example, which is how looking works: it brings its outlines with it. Blake said nature has no outline, only imagination does. Seeing means noticing the outlines themselves, the way each new school of painting saw limits its predecessors could not, or the way a physicist who sees turns physics into making. Birth, too, is origin. In causal terms I was merely reproduced at one point in an unbroken process; parents can wish for a child, never for this particular one. Dramatically, each birth breaks a family’s repetition and changes what its past meant. Yet the newborn is handed roles at once, eldest son, favourite daughter, heir to the family honour, avenger of its losses, each with a script one can spend a lifetime repeating, as Freud saw, instead of remembering it as past.
Refusing to let the past be past may be the deepest source of finite seriousness. Losers are invisible, and we come to every serious contest carrying that invisibility, determined to prove to an audience that we are not who we think they think we are. But to want victory badly enough we must believe their verdict, so proving them wrong only proves them right to ourselves, and the more we are recognised as winners the more we feel like losers. That is why celebrated winners never stop; no one is ever rich enough or applauded enough. Nations nurse a humiliating memory to keep fighting, Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine, Remember Pearl Harbor, and the Persian king Darius kept a servant to whisper in his ear that he must remember the Athenians. The genius in us does the opposite, using what Nietzsche called the faculty of forgetting to reshape the past rather than deny it. Genius cannot be given to anyone; it arises with touch. Being touched means answering from your own centre, and touching always goes both ways. Its opposite is being moved, pushed from outside toward a place someone has prepared, by a performance, a manifesto or a heroic tale, while the mover stays unmoved; an actor who weeps because of the role, rather than as the role, has failed. Moving works on our masks; touch passes through them. Healing works the same way. A physician cures, restoring a function so that we can compete again; to be healed is to be made whole, restored to play. I am never ill in general, only for some activity: my weight keeps me from flying by flapping my arms, and I do not call that an illness, unless I want to be a jockey. A cure removes the illness, while healing can happen with the illness still there, and it needs no specialist, only someone who comes from their own centre, ready to be healed too.
For the infinite player, sexuality is wholly a matter of touch, which makes it as dangerous to a society as real art, and societies veil it in two ways. One treats it as reproduction, a natural process that no one starts, since a child is not made by anyone but conceived when the conditions meet, so that sex has nothing to do with persons. The other treats it as feeling or behaviour, something to observe, regulate and manage, and even the rebels who break its taboos only confirm the rules they compete under. Finite sexuality is a contest that feeds on resistance, the plot of every pulp romance in which a cool girl is finally won by a persistent boy, and it is the one contest where the winner’s reward is the loser in person. Its displays range from widows burned on their husbands’ pyres to the spouse expected at an inauguration. It is staged, costumed and timed to end in a moment that can be remembered but never repeated. Carse goes further: sexuality shapes society more than society shapes it. We call the king the father of his country, not the father the king of the family, and society becomes the larger theatre where we keep trying to prove our parents wrong, an audience no death can dismiss. The civilised are, in Freud’s phrase, the discontented, and whole civilisations turn touchy: the Soviet Union embarrassed by Afghanistan, Britain by Argentina, the United States by Grenada. The only truly revolutionary act is to restore genius to sexuality. Infinite players cannot be labelled homosexual, heterosexual, celibate or faithful, because each word draws a boundary; they suffer others to be as they are, and so they learn. Their families are chosen and know they are chosen. They have no private parts, because what they open to each other is not the body but the person, and so, paradoxically, their play is the most embodied of all, a drama of touching.
A finite game needs something outside it. Its rules can say that it lasts sixty minutes, on a field a hundred yards long, between two teams of eleven, but never on what date, where, or with whose names. That absolute reference is a world. Winning an election by a few thousand votes makes sense inside the game; being the sixteenth President of the United States, in the eighteen hundred and sixtieth year of that world’s reckoning, makes sense absolutely. A world exists as an audience, people watching a contest without taking part, and no power can summon one; borrowing from Heidegger, Carse says a world worlds by itself. An audience is defined by what it watches, not by who is in it. No one remembers having been in the audience on 22 November 1963. They remember the ordinary thing they were doing, stepping out of the car and wondering what to cook, when the news came that the President had been shot. Players need a world to know what their winning means, and a world needs games to stay a world, like George Eliot’s cold Grandcourt, who cared nothing for admiration but needed admiring faces to stare at stonily. There are any number of worlds. And since the seriousness of finite play comes from wanting to correct someone’s opinion of us, the audience need not even be present: players become their own hostile spectators, and to play finitely is to be split inside. The audience splits too. It can lose itself so completely in the game that it wins and loses with the players, but each side brings its own partisans, so its unity consists in being divided.
Before a world, a finite game happens within time, and its time gets used up. Early on there seems to be plenty and strategies can wait; late in the game the choices narrow and every mistake costs more. We treat childhood as the season of possibility for the same reason, because so many paths to a good outcome still seem open. Victories happen in time, but titles are timeless, and finite history is pinned to triumphs meant never to be forgotten, David’s throne, Hastings, the great revolutions, so that time divided into eras is a scene between curtains, watched rather than lived. The result a finite player chases is a past that has not happened yet. The infinite player does not consume time but makes it. Such a player is neither young nor old, and there is no such thing for them as an hour; time comes as an hour spent loving, a day of grief, a season of study. Work is not how they pass the hours but how they pour hours into something that has a future, and they can never say how much is done, only that much remains unfinished. For the finite player, freedom depends on having time; for the infinite player, time depends on being free. The finite player fits the game into the hours available; the infinite player gives the game its own hours. Infinite players can sit in any audience too, but they look knowing that they are looking. To a finite watcher infinite play is invisible, an artwork to be studied and closed. But a watcher who catches the making in it stops being a watcher, finds that reading poetry is itself poetry, and becomes a beginner again. Against the timeless titles of finite play Carse sets a phrase of Meister Eckhart’s: eternal birth.
Nature, Carse says, is the realm of the unspeakable. It is voiceless and has nothing to say, and we experience that silence as its complete indifference to us. The Master Player in us cannot bear it and treats nature as an opponent it must subdue. Like hunters stalking prey we study its slightest movements; Bacon’s advice was that nature must be obeyed before it can be commanded. We look for a lawful order inside it, and once we find a pattern we can explain, and a prediction is only an explanation given in advance. Einstein marvelled that the world is comprehensible at all. But to speak for nature we must stand outside it, and so, ironically, the gods we silenced slip back in: having taken away their voices, we speak as they did, as supernatural masters. The irony holds only while we keep ourselves veiled, because nature allows no master. If we command only by obeying, we are not commanding. There is no unnatural act, nothing that can be done against nature or outside it, and Heisenberg conceded that what we observe is nature answering our way of questioning. Unveiled, we come back to a silence so complete we cannot tell what it is silent about. That silence does not stupefy; it is the source of metaphor, which joins things that can never become each other. A falcon can be the young prince of daylight in Hopkins’s poem only because daylight has no princes. All language is metaphor in this sense: we never hold the falcon, only the word for it. Language exists at all because nature cannot speak. To master nature is to silence the metaphor. The hunter does not so much kill a deer as kill the word deer, the strangeness that asked for attention.
If nature is the unspeakable, history is the speakable, and everyone who studies an age is looking from inside another one. Historians who talk of cycles and forces pretend to stand outside history, as scientists pretend to stand outside nature. Historians who know they are inside it give up explanation for narrative. Explanations show that things had to end as they did; stories show that they ended as they did when they need not have. Explanation can allow for chance but not for freedom, and a story has no room for causes. That ice floats on a pond while the coldest water sinks is true anywhere and always, but choosing to explain it to you, here, is an event in our story, and you will not listen until you suspect yourself of error. Large challenges are not argued; they are converted. No one slides from Lamarck to Darwin by small adjustments. Augustine, antiquity’s most famous convert, marvelled that he had held so many falsehoods, not that there are so many truths; he moved from one explanation to another. Explanation is combat, winning by defeating a listener, and the knowledge it wins behaves like property, published, displayed, standing in other people’s way, which is why scholars want higher salaries and industrialists sit on university boards. Victory brings the privilege of magisterial speech. The winner speaks first; the loser speaks only to concede and to promise silence. Victors speak for the defeated, never with them: husbands for wives in the finite family, kings for their realms, popes for the church. Before a god or a winner one falls silent because what one says no longer matters. That silence of obedience is a silence nobody hears, the silence of death, and so the demand for obedience, Carse says, is itself evil.
Infinite speech keeps reminding us that nature cannot be spoken. It claims no truth and is never about something; it is always addressed to somebody, an address rather than a command. Its meaning lies not in what was already so before it was said but in what comes of saying it, so infinite speakers must wait to hear what their listeners do with their words before they know what they have said. People understand each other, Wittgenstein suggested, not by sharing knowledge but by knowing how to go on together. Infinite speech takes the form of listening, and its silence is not the one where speech has died but the one where speech is born. Gods who speak as the lords of their world cannot create it; they are only its idols, and Simone Weil called the religions of a commanding god idolatrous even when they worship one. A god could make a world only by listening. Storytellers likewise convert no one. A story cannot be obeyed, only entered, and in its telling we suddenly see our scattered experiences take the shape of an unfinished narrative. Great stories feel fated, yet fate is a sign that choices matter: you cannot choose for me, but you can decide what my choices will be about. Oedipus kills a stranger in a rage and marries the stranger’s widow, moving like a Master Player making final moves that turn out not to be final. Even blinding himself, meant to end everything, opens a higher sight. He sees what he did, not what the gods did to him; what was limited was his vision. The close of his story opens. Nobody knows their own story whole, since to know it would be to stop living it and start performing it. The historian’s work is to reopen every supposed ending, because nothing that began in freedom can be closed off by necessity.
We control nature, Carse goes on, for social reasons. A few physicists working at the highest level of abstraction predicted a chain of subatomic reactions that became a thermonuclear bomb, and it was exploded not to prove them right but to control the behaviour of millions of people. Power over nature masks a wish for power over each other. Two attitudes follow. Treat nature as a hostile other and you get the machine, by which Carse means all technology, as mechanical in a hydrogen bomb as in a Neanderthal’s lever. Discipline yourself to live with nature’s deepest patterns and you get the garden: not a bed at the edge of the yard but a garden one lives inside, a culture built to adjust to the widest range of surprise. Machines can sit in a garden as finite games sit inside an infinite one; the question is which serves which. A machine must be designed, built and fuelled from outside, while a plant can only be helped to grow by its own vitality, and life can be discovered but never supplied. Nature has no inside or outside and cannot be turned against itself; a poison kills particular creatures but is not unnatural, since nothing is. Our freedom is not to change nature but to change ourselves. Order and chaos are only names for whether nature’s indifferent spontaneity happens to agree with our habits, so a hurricane or a plague looks chaotic to some and orderly to others. The more a culture respects that indifference, the more spontaneous it becomes; the harder we force nature, the more helpless we are before it. A rain forest tens of thousands of years in the making can be felled in months, and then nothing holds back the desert, which is every bit as natural as the forest was.
Machines show the contradiction most plainly. With fingertip controls a crew can cut a six-lane highway through mountains or fill a wetland for a shopping mall, but every operator must take up a set place and move as the machine requires: using a machine means becoming a part of it. Products sold as styled in fact standardise their buyers, asking us to express our genius by giving it up. Machines also work against themselves, because what we want is for them to vanish: a perfect radio is only sound, and we notice the film only when it goes out of focus. In a car, behind glass, raising and lowering a foot, we believe we have travelled, but we have carried our living room to the airport lounge and the aircraft seat and never left home. A car does not take us on a journey; it simply delivers us. Such movement is theatre, a change of scenes that lets us pass through other people’s towns and histories untouched and unseen. And we use machines against each other. If your business cannot be read by my computer, or you live where I cannot drive, I find another partner or another friend; the machine decides. Weapons are the extreme, built to affect others without affecting us, made to finish contests, not to win them. A killer wins nothing, Carse says; a killer is a player whose game has been abolished. In modern airborne warfare the operator meets only buttons, blips and dials, and the enemy is struck while still unseen, until it begins to seem that people are enemies because they are unseen. Those who cannot see kill those they cannot see, and indifference to nature turns into the indifference to persons behind the century’s greatest crimes by its most civilised nations.
If indifference to nature produces the machine, the indifference of nature produces the garden, and every culture is a kind of gardening: drawing out other people’s spontaneity through one’s own, respecting a source and refusing to turn it into a resource. Gardeners kill nothing. They gather fruit, seed, grain and root when ripe and when gathering helps the garden live on. Animals do not ripen; they are killed at the height of their vitality and raised like products, cattle penned so their flesh stays soft, geese nailed to the floor and force-fed for their livers. You learn to drive a car, Carse says, but you become a gardener. A harvest is not an ending, only a phase, and winter is not a garden’s death but a quiet readying for spring. The more varied the life in the soil, the livelier the garden, and the same holds for a culture: the genius in you stirs the genius in me. A garden is never a way of arriving. It is a place you come to ready to change, the way real parents grow with their children instead of steering them through set stages. It is in the garden, too, that we learn what travel is. True travel has no arrival point; travellers keep discovering that they are somewhere else, because the change happens in them. Distance is not length but difference, and the motels around the airports of Chicago and Atlanta are so like those around Tokyo’s and Frankfurt’s that the distance between them dissolves. Proust thought the only true voyage would be to see one landscape through a hundred other people’s eyes. A gardener learns to see the smallest changes in soil, insects and seedlings, and, as a parent or a teacher, in children and students. Thoreau said he had travelled a good deal in Concord.
Machines need power from outside, so they turn nature into a reservoir of things to burn. We do not exhaust nature, which cannot be used up; we rearrange our lives so that we can respond to it less, and the name for that is waste. Waste is not left over from production; it is one of the things produced, as waste plutonium is a product of the nuclear industry. And waste unveils. Standing in garbage we know is ours, we see that we chose to make it and could choose not to, so we hide it: in empty land until the land is uninhabitable, downstream, in slums, on distant farms where the acid settles. No one owns it and everyone competes to be rid of it; it is the property of losers, the emblem of the untitled. The parallel is grim. A society that makes natural waste makes human waste, people no longer useful as resources, put out of sight in ghettos, reservations, camps, retirement villages, mass graves and strategic hamlets, the many millions of superfluous persons, in the phrase Carse takes from Rubenstein. Settlers on three continents did not stumble on such people; they rendered them superfluous. Once society is unveiled as something we want rather than something we must have, nature stops being fitted to our goals and shows only its own self-origination, its genius, and we see it that way only when we see as geniuses ourselves. Nature offers no home. In the Jewish and Islamic story God gave us a garden but could not do the gardening; we were to name the animals, and though life was breathed into us, the breathing after that was ours to do. I cannot write anyone or anything into my script without denying where they come from. Nature’s homelessness, its utter indifference to us, shows the infinite player that nature is the very source of the dramatic.
Myth, Carse says as he nears the end, provokes explanation but accepts none of it. Explanation settles regions of order, some as large as continents, but they were first mapped by adventurers on journeys into the open, and the settlers who follow forget that everything they know so firmly is still afloat on myth. What Copernicus cleared away was not myth but rival explanations. What resounds in his life is not the fact he set down but the old story of the solitary wanderer, the peregrinus, setting out with a hundred pairs of eyes. A culture’s strength is capped by its myths, and its liveliness is measured by how often its thinkers set out, not by how much they bring home. What turns a story into myth is being told again and again for no reason beyond itself. Our first response to a great story is the wish to tell it, as if the story were using us to find its next telling. We cannot watch such a story from outside, just as an infinite game has no spectators. We understand our experience by it, not it by our experience, so much so that an experience we cannot tell as a story has, in a sense, not happened to us at all. Freud did not reach Oedipus through theory; the myth shaped how he listened, and he admitted that the theory of instincts was, so to speak, his mythology, one strong enough to change experience itself. The Torah does not record the Jewish story so much as make Judaism into one. Carse pictures myths as enchanted trees growing in culture’s garden out of nature’s silent soil: strip them for meaning or prune them to a favoured shape, and they only grow larger and more fruitful. Meaning does not lie inside them waiting; it flows out of them.
Storytellers turn into ideologists when they believe they know a people’s whole story, its beginning and end in plain view. Therapist and patient begin to look toward a horizon only when the Freudian myth stops dictating what happens between them and lets their relationship have a story of its own. Myths should resonate, not repeat. Those who claim land on the strength of a biblical promise, or cast a modern nation as the army of prophecy, repeat the Bible without resonating with it. A myth resonates when I hear its voice within my own, though not as my own, the way we hear New York in a New Yorker’s voice. When you tell me the story of Muhammad, rather than quote it, I am touched and respond from my own centre, and something begins between us. The most resonant myths have lost their authors. Moses received the law, Muhammad heard the Quran, Christians read the gospel according to Mark, and Hindus call the Vedas what is heard. No one can name the first New Yorker. Myth is our highest form of listening to each other, which is why religions prize listening over speaking; faith comes by hearing, Paul wrote. Resonance has an opposite, amplification. A choir is many voices sounding together; a loudspeaker is one voice that drowns the rest. A bell sets the air ringing around it, a cannon simply overpowers: one we listen to, the other leaves us mute. Ideology is amplified myth, history with nothing left to say, to be lived out obediently. Just as the warmakers of Europe kept melting church bells down to cast cannon, metaphysicians extract their myths’ meanings and announce them without the ringing. What ideologists hide is that history is sung by many voices, unlike and even hostile to each other, and each one is what lets the others be heard.
If myth provokes explanation, explanation’s deepest aim is to eliminate myth: the cannon are cast precisely to silence the bells. This is finite play at its most contradictory, playing so as to end all need for play. A loudspeaker that drowns every other voice ends as noise no one listens to. Julius Caesar loved the dangerous politics of the Republic and played them so well that he destroyed every opponent, until he could speak with no one; the historian Syme wondered whether he was almost looking for his own assassination. Wherever play hardens into the seriousness of war, people are troubled by myths whose forgetting they cannot quite forget, and these are often very simple stories. Abraham had only two sons, one born outside his marriage, and was promised descendants as many as the stars. Three religions call themselves his children, each at times claiming to be the last, while the promise of the stars keeps any family from closing. It is a promise whose future always has more future in it, a story with a horizon instead of an ending. The Buddha’s enlightenment, a mortal’s release even from the need to report his release, has produced a flood of writing in scores of languages that is still rising. The Christian story is the one most troubling to the ideological mind: a god who becomes one of us in order to listen, giving up commanding speech, received by worlds that preferred a magisterial idol. Christians deaf to their own myth have driven engines of slaughter through history’s garden, yet the one they recast as an instrument of vengeance keeps coming back as the man of sorrows, his story unfinished, giving the silenced back their voices. But no myth is necessary. Infinite players cannot be Christians, Buddhists, Muslims, atheists or even New Yorkers in earnest; such titles are only playful masks worn for laughter’s sake. Infinite players are never serious actors in anyone’s story; they are the glad makers of a story that keeps starting things they will never complete. Then a last section, one line long: “There is but one infinite game.”
James P. Carse joined the faculty of New York University in 1963, taught the history and literature of religion there for decades, directed its religious studies program and won its Great Teacher Award. Finite and Infinite Games has been translated into more than a dozen languages. In 2019 Simon Sinek built a leadership book, The Infinite Game, on its central distinction and brought it a large new readership in business, though some reviewers felt the business reading narrowed what Carse meant. Carse died at his home in Rowe, Massachusetts, on 25 September 2020. He was eighty-seven.