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.

But is it not already an insult to call chess anything so narrow as a game? Is it not also a science, an art,

I remembered a hunter’s trick, that the most reliable technique for decoying the wood grouse was to imitate its mating call.

The man is quite right to set hefty prices; in every field, the real experts are also the best at business. And as far as I’m concerned, the more straightforward the deal, the better.

a force more sophisticated than crude beating or physical torture: the most exquisite isolation imaginable. 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.

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.