Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

“Why not? C’est son métier. If I had a toothache and there happened to be a dentist on board, I wouldn’t ask him to pull my tooth free of charge.

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. You waited for something from morning until night, and nothing happened. You went on waiting and waiting. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, thinking, thinking, thinking, until your temples throbbed. Nothing happened. You were alone. Alone. Alone.

And since I could never tell how much they had already ferreted out, every statement became the most terrible responsibility.

And all the time nothing around me but the table, the bureau, the bed, the wallpaper, the window,

The repetition of these over and over really feels like a man who is trapped and could only interact those things

In a concentration camp you might have had to cart stones around until your hands bled and your feet froze in your shoes, you would have been jammed together with two dozen other men in the cold and stench. But you would have seen faces, you would have been able to look at a field, a cart, a tree, a star, something, anything, whereas here it was always the same thing around you, always the same thing, the terrible sameness.

The idea of a concentration camp being almost a mercy is interesting

It’s easy to say: four months—two syllables. 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, always this table and bed and washbasin and wallpaper, and always the silence, always the same guard pushing food in without looking at you, always the same thoughts in that nothingness revolving around a single thought, until you go mad.

Luckily he didn’t hear me. Perhaps he didn’t want to hear me.

in this anteroom, where I had to stand for two hours until I was ready to drop (I wasn’t permitted to sit down, of course), hung a calendar, and I am not capable of explaining to you how, in my hunger for anything printed, anything written, I stared and stared at that one number, that little bit of writing ‘July 27’ on the wall; my brain devoured it,

with two windows instead of one, without the bed and without the washbasin and without that particular crack in the windowsill that I had looked at a million times. The door was painted a different color, there was a different chair against the wall

Then, when it had finally rolled off, I counted the buttons on the coats over again, eight on one, eight on another, ten on the third, and compared the lapels once more; my voracious eyes touched, caressed, embraced all these ridiculous, trivial details with a hunger I am unable to describe.

This is the only context (well not only, but definitely one of them) where I’m ok with someone remembering absurd details (unlike EoV) Also it’s a bit weird he’s sharing all this with a stranger. But perhaps he hasn’t been out long and needs to company?

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.”

Something in me wanted to come out on top, and yet all there was for me to fight was this other me in me;

I had not yet had enough of this miracle. I struggled to sit up in my bed in order to gaze after her, this miraculous human being who was kind.

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

This feels ahead of the author’s time. Or is my perception of philosophical history off?

I regret that it was played for such thoroughly incompetent spectators and that its course is as lost to the annals of chess as Beethoven’s piano improvisations are to music.

Such gems of prose!

We all watched him with some amazement, but none with as much unease as I, for it struck me that his steps always measured out the same distance despite the intensity of his pacing; it was as though each time he ran up against an invisible barrier in the middle of the empty room, forcing him to reverse course.