(Continued from Sept. 3, 2009)
George Steiner on chess:
"At the sight of a set, even the tawdriest of plastic pocket sets,
one’s fingers arch and a coldness as in a light sleep steals over
one’s spine. Not for gain, not for knowledge or reknown, but
in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach’s inverted
canons or Euler’s formula for polyhedra."
— George Steiner in “A Death of Kings,” The New Yorker,
issue dated September 7, 1968, page 133
A related remark from Dudeney:
See also a different context for 16 squares and 322,560 arrangements.