The Lüneburg Variation – Paolo Maurensig
He went to the window and glanced down at the traffic eight stories below. The road was choked with cars. Throngs swarmed on the sidewalks in counterposed, intermingled streams. From so high up it all seemed fluid and impersonal, as though a mass of detritus were being swept away by water. That was all you really had to do to determine people’s destiny: rise high enough to alter your view, making it divine. Compassion, mercy, love—these were relative, contingent terms, never absolute. What sort of love or compassion could you feel for a sacrificed chess piece? For a moment Frisch was struck by an irrepressible nostalgia for his youth. It suddenly occurred to him that all these people were wallowing in their own defeat. However splendid and lush things seemed, there was nevertheless a collective failure, to which the great majority seemed thoroughly resigned.
What could possibly rouse those somnambulant masses? Perhaps not even war.
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As I said, these were early days, the most beautiful phase of any endeavor, when everything seems like a dream. At the time I had no idea of the price art must pay to life, the odious tribute the ideal owes to the material.
I’ve seen the most amazing tricks performed by trained animals who bear the indelible marks of countless tortures beneath their elegance of movement. All pleasure seems to vanish once perfection is attained—indeed, long before it.
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Every choice automatically implies the abandonment of alternatives. We’d be immortal if we weren’t forced to make choices, and in the end I, too, had to submit to this rule.
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[…]“Suggestions can heal… or kill. Let’s not underestimate them. In any case, the reaction to the mistake always springs from one’s own being. Besides which, it’s not the means that count but the ends.”
“Meaning that you lied to me?”.
“The individual conscience is an inconfutable reality—that much is true.”
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There is no harsher or more implacable defeat (ed. in chess). The players bear lifelong scars, neither body nor soul ever recovering fully. Anything that might reawaken memory of the mutilation is violently repulsed.
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As the taxi took me through the city to the station, I felt as though I’d been dropped onto another planet, a cruel and hostile place. Inclined by character to silence and reflection, I’d always been repulsed by noise and uproar, by any manifestation of the excessive merriment that so often borders on violence. I’d always detested student revelry, as though death became even more menacing to me precisely in the rites meant to exorcise it.
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The pieces were of maple and ebony, smooth but not polished, of excellent quality, with an extraordinary balance of weight and form. The bases were padded with velvet that let them slide softly over the squares, on which they rested in a kind of haughty immobility.