Chess and Madness
On chess, madness and Bobby Fischer, in The Paris Review online:
“Chess has no transcendental or metaphysical justification. But neither do any of the other pursuits that make us human. Fischer may, in some sense, have been mad all along. He certainly, since his earliest childhood, was barely functional the moment he stepped away from the board. And yet, until he was twenty-nine years old, this bare ability to function still allowed him to reach unprecedented heights in one of mankind’s peculiar little forms of art.”
