Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

As is the case with all those of a tenacious nature, he lacked any sense of the ridiculous;

Monomaniacs of any kind, those people fixated by a single idea, have been a source of fascination for me my whole life, for the more a man limits his field of vision, the closer he is, conversely, to the infinite; those very people who seem so remote from the world construct with their own unique material, termite-like, a remarkable and completely unique shorthand for the world itself.

isn't one guilty of insultingly diminishing chess by even calling it a game?

They did nothing to us – they just put us into total nothingness, for it is known that there is no more element on earth that can exert such pressure on the human soul as nothingness.

setting out to play against oneself in chess represents therefore the same sort of paradox as a man jumping over his own shadow.