I like the meta of chess more than the execution of it. You look at the language people use to describe chess and it sounds so dramatic: attack, defend. Games are played with unique style from opening to endgame. Strategies and opponents, trading and counter-attacks. Chess gains the prestige of life-metaphor, in some way that's never made sense to me. Because the description is the metaphor, while the game itself is just pieces being moved according to rules with goals in mind. Which, sure, itself, could be sort of a life-metaphor. But it's not a terribly dramatic one. Though in one mood or another one might concede (concede!) to it the status of honesty.

Of course, I'm jaded, because I've long since learned that to become good at chess is to seek to be as close to the "best" at it out of everybody in the world who plays it, and that "close" will never be a word one will ever use to describe my level of chess mastery, and that for as much as you might study the game, there's still only so far you'll ever get, and it will never be far enough, so I might as well go off and start a litblog or something, in which realm at least nobody cares who's better than who. Right?

Right?

Hell.

Anyway, I started reading The Yiddish Policemen's Union today, in which Michael Chabon describes the book Three Hundred Chess Games as being "the book of orderly surprises," which I think might be the most accurately beautiful possible description of a book about chess that can be had. Because, really: nothing is new, though perception makes it so, and anyway seriously fuck Chabon for making the composition of a phrase like that seem so effortless. Come on. Jealousy is unbecoming.