sloth unleashed

Bobby Fischer; unknown photographer. “Stefan Zweig suggests both that chess is a cause of madness and that, perhaps more importantly, madness may be why certain people are defenseless against the charms of chess. That far, I follow him. But I think that Zweig mounts an even more radical attack on chess. His antichess novella [Schachnovelle] raises a last question—admittedly, the most worrying one that any chess lover must, but does not want to, face: Perhaps we should not think of a serious, truly life-engrossing devotion to chess as a cause of madness. For perhaps it simply is madness. Perhaps devoting one’s life to that singular obsession—the ‘ridiculous goal of backing a wooden king into the corner of a wooden board,’ as Zweig so aptly put it—does not bring on, but rather constitute, madness.” — Yascha Mounk, from “Chess and Madness” in The Paris Review (thanks to theredshoes)