January 19, 2008
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A Death of Kings:
In Memory of
Bobby FischerEdward 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.
