Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

Like all headstrong types, Czentovic had no sense of the ridiculous; ever since his triumph in the world tournament, he considered himself the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all these clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers on their own ground, and above all the evident fact that he made more money than they did, transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.

All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.

They did nothing—other than subjecting us to complete nothingness. For, as is well known, nothing on earth puts more pressure on the human mind than nothing.

But even thoughts, insubstantial as they seem, need a footing, or they begin to spin, to run in frenzied circles; they can’t bear nothingness either.

playing chess against oneself is thus as paradoxical as jumping over one’s own shadow.

My awful situation was forcing me to at least try to divide myself into a Black Me and a White Me in order not to be crushed by the horrendous nothingness around me.”

apparently there are hidden regulatory forces at work within us which automatically shut off anything that might become psychologically troublesome or dangerous.

Suddenly there was something new between the two of them: a dangerous tension, a passionate hatred. They were no longer opponents testing their abilities in a spirit of play, but enemies resolved to annihilate each other.