“But aren’t we guilty of being insultingly disparaging if we refer to chess as a game? Is it not also a science, an art, poised between one and the other like Muhammad’s coffin between heaven and earth, a unique synthesis of all opposites; 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, an art without works, an architecture without materials, which has nevertheless proven more lasting in its form and history than any works or books, the only game that belongs every era and among every people, of which no one knows what god brought it to earth to kill boredom, sharpen the wits and tauten the spirit? Where is its beginning and where its end?”
A Chess Story (1941), Stefan Zweig, tr. Alexander Starritt
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