More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
he dominated checkers as perhaps no one has dominated any competitive pursuit in the history of humankind. He won the next twenty-eight tournaments and championship matches he entered, none being particularly close. He defeated Lafferty himself in a world championship. At one point, he went a full decade without losing a single game.
But the books and boards in his house were little more than props; the real checkers work happened in Tinsley’s mind. He could play twenty games at once blindfolded and win them all; he put himself through college playing such exhibitions for fifty dollars apiece, according to a profile in Sports Illustrated. Checkers
“They realize the world does not think that much of them.”
“It’s easy to take family for granted, just because they’re always there,” he said. “But then one day maybe they’re not there. And you say, ‘Holy shit, what have I done?’
The games in this book are their own set of canonized art objects, each one a unique expression of agency. For decades in some cases and millennia in others, members of the human race have inhabited their skeletons, each member in turn existing for a time in the same body, seeing through the same eyes, exercising the same will, experiencing the same world from within a magic circle.
