In chess, as a purely intellectual game, where randomness is excluded, - for someone to play against himself is absurd ... It is as paradoxical, as attempting to jump over his own shadow.
Interpretation
Playing chess against oneself is a contradictory act, as it lacks the essential challenge of opposition.
Stefan Zweig highlights the absurdity of playing chess against oneself, comparing it to the impossibility of jumping over one's own shadow. This metaphor illustrates a deeper philosophical insight: the need for external challenges and opponents in life, emphasizing that growth and understanding come through interaction with others rather than isolation.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of competition in personal growth.
All my life I have been passionately interested in monomaniacs of any kind, people carried away by a single idea. The more one limits oneself, the closer one is to the infinite; these people, as unworldly as they seem, burrow like termites into their own particular material to construct, in miniature, a strange and utterly individual image of the world.
When they are preparing for war, those who rule by force speak most copiously about peace until they have completed the mobilization process.
Only ambition is fired by the coincidences of success and easy accomplishment but nothing is quite as splendidly uplifting to the heart as the defeat of a human being who battles against the invincible superiority of fate. This is always the most grandiose of all tragedies, one sometimes created by a dramatist but created thousands of times by life.
Now I am discovering the world once more. England has widened my horizon.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.
Only the person who has experienced light and darkness, war and peace, rise and fall, only that person has truly experienced life.
The great thing, and the only thing, is to adore and praise GOD.
As for the men in power, they are so anxious to establish the myth of infallibility that they do their utmost to ignore truth.
Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.
There would not be a perfect likeness of God in the universe if all things were of one grade of being.
The reader becomes God, for all textual purposes. I see your eyes glazing over, so I'll hush.
Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?
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