Chess Story

by Stefan Zweig

In principle I could readily understand how such a delightful game must engender its own unique matadors; but how hard, how impossible it was to imagine the life of any mentally active person for whom the world was reduced to the narrow one-way path from black to white, who looked for his life's victories purely in the moving here and there, back and forth of 32 pieces, a person to whom a new opening move, opting for the knight rather than the pawn, represented a mighty deed and a pitiful speck of immortality in the footnotes of some chess book – a person, an intelligent person, who, without going mad, for 10, 20, 30, 40 years would turn all the horsepower of his brain over and over to the ridiculous exertion of pushing a wooden king towards the corner of a wooden board.