Beth was in high school now, and there was a chess club, but she did not belong. The boys in it were nonplused to have a Master walking the hallways, and they would stare at her in a kind of embarrassed awe when she passed.
Sometimes being with Benny was like being with no one at all. For hours at a time he would be completely impersonal. Something in her responded to that, and she became impersonal and cool herself, communicating nothing but chess.
A Girl Mozart Startles the World of Chess.
He thought, looking at the cat, if only you were the intelligent species on this world. And then, smiling wryly, maybe you are.
Suddenly everyone was quiet, and they all began to look at Beth. She felt rising in her a hatred as black as night.
She felt in herself an inexhaustible ability to find strong, threatening moves.
What she did was at bottom shockingly trivial, but the energy of her amazing mind crackled in the room for those who knew how to listen.
My experience has taught me that what you know isn’t always important.” “What is important?” “Living and growing,” Mrs. Wheatley said with finality. “Living your life.
If you win, what will you do afterward?” He looked puzzled. “I don’t understand.” “If you’re World Champion at sixteen, what will you do with the rest of your life?” He still looked puzzled. “I don’t understand,” he said.
It would be nice to have a cheeseburger. She laughed wryly at herself; a cheeseburger was what an American of a type she thought she would never be craved when travelling abroad.
What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift?
What if she had already done it to herself? What if she had shaved away from the surface of her brain whatever synaptic interlacings had formed her gift? She remembered reading somewhere that some pop artist once bought an original drawing by Michelangelo – and had taken a piece of art gum and erased it, leaving blank paper. The waste had shocked her. Now she felt a similar shock as she imagined the surface of her own brain with the talent for chess wiped away.
She had heard of the genetic code that could shape an eye or hand from passing proteins. Deoxyribonucleic acid. It contained the entire set of instructions for constructing a respiratory system and a digestive one, as well as the grip of an infant’s hand. Chess was like that. The geometry of a position could be read and reread and not exhausted of possibility. You saw deeply into the layer of it, but there was another layer beyond that, and another, and another.
She liked the power of the pieces, exerted along files and diagonals. In the middle of the game, when pieces were everywhere, the forces crisscrossing the board thrilled her.
Openings.” He did not look at her; he was watching the board. “Is it?” He shrugged. “The Queen’s Gambit.
Everything he was doing was obvious, unimaginative, bureaucratic.
But when he was a mile from the town, walking through a barren field, toward the low hills where his camp was, all of it suddenly came over him in one crushing shock – the strangeness of it, the danger, the pain and worry in his body – and he fell to the ground and lay there, his body and his mind crying out against the violence that was being done to them by this most foreign, most strange and alien of all places.
He began to feel what he had sometimes felt before; a heavy lassitude, a world-weariness, a profound fatigue with this busy, busy, destructive world and all its chittering noises. He felt as though he could give the whole thing up, that it was foolish, impossibly foolish to have started it, more than twenty years before. He looked around him again, tiredly. What was he doing here – here on this other world, third from the sun, a hundred million miles from his home?
To beat the other man. To beat him as utterly, as completely as possible: This was the deep and abiding meaning of the game of pool. And, it seemed to Eddie in that minute of thought, it was the meaning of more than the game of pool, more than the five-by-ten-foot microcosm of ambition and desire. It seemed to him as if all men must know this because it is in every meeting and every act, in the.
Beth was White, and she played pawn to king four, hoping for the Sicilian. She knew the Sicilian better than anything else. But Klein played pawn to king four and then fianchettoed his king’s bishop, setting it over in the corner above his castled king. She wasn’t quite sure but thought this was the kind of opening called “Irregular.