Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

I was strolling through the smoking room quite by chance when I saw your friends sitting at the chessboard; I was rooted to the spot with astonishment and horror. For I had totally forgotten that one can play chess on a real chessboard and with real pieces, that this is a game where two totally different people sit opposite each other in the flesh. I honestly needed a few minutes to recall that what was being played was fundamentally the same game that, in my despair, I had been attempting to play against myself for months on end. To think that the letters and numbers that I employed to aid me during my furious routine were only a substitute for, and a symbol of, those real ivory figures! My surprise that this moving of pieces around a board was the same as my fantasies of imagination is perhaps comparable to that of an astronomer who, by complicated calculations, has worked out the existence of a new planet, and then perceives it in real life as a clear, white, substantial star in the sky.