CHESS STORY

by Stefan Zweig

Zweig takes this particular game to unfold his story and to anchor his analogy with human convictions because it is the only game that does not depend on chance, but that success in playing it depends exclusively on the meticulousness of the strategy, a perfectly designed and rigorously memorized strategy.

But what annoyed the good priest most about the clumsy boy was his utter apathy. He did nothing unless specially asked, never asked any questions, did not play with other boys, and did not seek any occupation on his own without being expressly asked.

I have always been interested in any kind of monomaniac obsessed with a single idea, for the more restricted a man is, the closer he is to infinity.

And do we not commit an offense in calling chess a game? Is it not also a science and an art that oscillates between those categories, as Mohammed’s coffin oscillated between heaven and earth, as a unique link between pairs of opposites?

Nothing was done to us, we were simply placed in a complete vacuum, and everyone knows that nothing on earth puts as much pressure on the human soul as a vacuum.

Of course, I now realize that this condition of mine was a pathological form of intellectual overstimulation, for which I have found no other name than one hitherto unknown to medicine: chess poisoning.