Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

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.

You walked up and down, you and your thoughts, up and down, over and over. 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.

It takes no time at all to form the words: four months! But there’s no way to describe, to gauge, to delineate, not for someone else, not for yourself, how long time lasts in dimensionlessness, in timelessness, and you can’t explain to anyone how it eats at you and destroys you, this nothing and nothing and nothing around you,

Each of my two selves, the black one and the white one, had to vie against the other, and each conceived its own ambition, its own impatience, to gain the ascendancy, to win; after each move as White, I was in a fever to know what Black would do.