A Chess Story

a person, an intellectual person who, without going insane and for ten, twenty, thirty, forty years, directs his mind’s full analytic force time and again onto the laughable task of backing a wooden king into the angle of a wooden board

ancient and yet always new, mechanical in its structure yet animated only by the imagination, limited to a geometrically petrified space yet unlimited in its permutations, always developing yet ever sterile, a logic with no result, a mathematics without calculations

bustle and commotion

ldren ran up and down flights of stairs while the orchestra played imperturbably on deck. I was standing in conversation with a friend on the promenade deck, slightly apart from this turmoil, when flashbulbs popped starkly two or three times beside us—it seemed that a few reporters had managed to hastily interview and photograph some celebrity just before our departure. My friend looked across and smiled. “You have an odd fish on board with you there, that’s Czentovic.” And since I must have looked fairly baffled in response to this news, he exp

take leave of their friends

skew-whiff caps

bustle and commotion

of his meteoric career

orchestra played imperturbably on deck

in skew-whiff caps