Log24

Edward Rothstein has a piece on Bobby Fischer in today’s New York Times.  The Rothstein opening:

“There may be only three human activities in which miraculous accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and chess.”

This echoes the opening of a classic George Steiner essay (The New Yorker, Sept. 7, 1968):

“There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess.”

— “A Death of Kings,” reprinted in George Steiner: A Reader, Oxford University Press, 1984, pp. 171-178.

Despite its promising (if unoriginal) opening, the New York Times piece is mainly an attack on Fischer’s anti-Jewish stance.  Rothstein actually has little of interest to say about what he calls the “glass-bead games” of music, mathematics, and chess. For a better-written piece on chess and madness, see Charles Krauthammer’s 2005 essay in TIME. The feuilletons of Rothstein and Krauthammer do not, of course, come close to the genuinely bead-game-like writing of Steiner.