Word: monomanias
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...films, all meaty and intelligent, told in part from the view of a suicide bomber. Hany Abu-Assad's gnarly, poignant Paradise Now is set on the West Bank; Joseph Castelo's knockout nail biter The War Within takes place in New York City. But both have the monomania of an Islamic jihadist and the momentum of a Hitchcock movie about a bomb on a bus. Their simple narratives are the fuse that inexorably leads to the big blast. Syriana also ends with an explosion, but its journey there is through a labyrinth...
...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...
Granted freedom, we are eager to confine ourselves. We are an ambitious lot; our monomania structures our ambition. It functions as a sort of limit—it’s impossible, after all, to avail ourselves of all of the College’s extracurricular and social opportunities; devoting ourselves wholeheartedly to one activity acts as a sort of check. This devotion to a single activity binds circles of friends and decides blocking groups. It can act as a sort of de facto career counseling. The danger, of course, is in our limiting ourselves too sharply. But monomania itself...
...share this theory of checked monomania with my roommate...