without narcissism (2.20)

you’d think by now there’d be no more new chess openings, that all those permutations would have been uncovered, and perhaps that is true. perhaps none are new. my guess is some anonymous chess player’s made every move
but no one recorded those openings for posterity, and that anonymous player couldn’t have cared less. he may have been an idiot who merely stumbled onto those moves; she may have been a genius who just cared nothing for the game; he may have been an average guy, from an average family, with an average life, who knew he was good but not the significance; she could have been born in the wrong time, in the wrong circumstances, and only played for fun. whoever made those moves, one or many, i imagine they have all been made, and i am guessing it is lack of ego, lack of self-aggrandizement (unless it was lack of opportunity) that let those moves slip away into time, let them remain just one magical moment in a meaningless game, only to be rediscovered by some savant narcissist and turned into a modern miracle of gaming excellence.