Word: chess
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...Fischer is the poster boy for the mad chess genius, a species with a pedigree going back at least to Paul Morphy, who after his triumphal 1858-59 tour of Europe returned to the U.S., abruptly quit the game and is said to have wandered the streets of New Orleans talking to himself. Others have verged more on the edge of eccentricity. The great Wilhelm Steinitz claimed to have played against God, given him an extra pawn and won. Neither player left a record of the game...
...such proximity between genius and madness in chess? There are three possible explanations. One is that chess is a monomania. You study it intensively day and night from childhood if you are going to rise to the ranks of the greats, and that kind of singular focus constricts your reality and makes you more vulnerable to distortions of it. "A chess genius," wrote George Steiner, "is a human being who focuses vast, little understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise. Almost inevitably, this focus produces pathological symptoms of nervous stress and unreality." Plausible, perhaps, but there...
...Well, then, this must be monomania of a certain sort. Chess is a particularly enclosed, self-referential activity. It's not just that it lacks the fresh air of sport, but that it lacks connections to the real world outside--a tether to reality enjoyed by the monomaniacal students of other things, say, volcanic ash or the mating habits of the tsetse fly. As Stefan Zweig put it in his classic novella The Royal Game, chess is "thought that leads nowhere, mathematics that add up to nothing, art without an end product, architecture without substance...
...chess has a third--and unique--characteristic that is particularly fatal. It is not just monomaniacal and abstract, but its arena is a playing field on which the other guy really is after you. The essence of the game is constant struggle against an adversary who, by whatever means of deception and disguise, is entirely, relentlessly, unfailingly dedicated to your destruction. It is only a board, but it is a field of dreams for paranoia...
...sure I like this line of reasoning because it means that I, who have spent countless hours in public parks, chess clubs and my library at home fighting for my (king's) life, would be stark raving mad by now. I suspect that I am not. I like to tell myself that I am in pretty sane company. The game certainly has its pantheon of upstanding citizens. While ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin preferred to eschew the Paris opera for chess at the Caf? de la R?gence. (Excellent choice.) Napoleon played, although to judge by one of his games...