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.

If I spend an hour in front of the board, this is by no means to exert myself but, on the contrary, to relieve emotional tension. I “play” chess in the truest sense, while the others, the real chess players, “work” it, if I may use the word in this daring new way.

Accustomed to ruthlessly asserting himself in life and spoiled by actual success, this un-yielding self-made man was so unshakably imbued with a sense of his own superiority that any resistance infuriated him, as though it were some inadmissible revolt, practically an affront.

my surprise that this movement of pieces on the board was what I had visualized in subjective space could be compared to that of an astronomer who uses the most complex methods to work out on paper the existence of a new heavenly body and then actually sees it in the sky as a distinct, white, physical star.