Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

But when I tried to play through an entire game with my ridiculous crumb chessmen, half of which I had darkened with dust to set them apart from the others, at first I failed totally. During those early days I was constantly becoming confused; I had to start this one game from the beginning over and over again—five times, ten times, twenty times. But who under the sun had so much unoccupied and unoccupiable time as I, the slave of nothingness? Who had such infinite reserves of desire and patience? After six days I played the game perfectly all the way through; after another eight days I didn’t even need the crumbs on the bedspread to make the positions in the book real to me; and after eight more days I could do without the checkered bedspread—the symbols in the book, a1, a2, c7, c8, which had been abstract at the beginning, automatically turned into visible, three-dimensional positions in my head.