Used to play around with kind of a specially carved wooden chess set and board that my dad had as a children's toy--the pieces were quite big and blocky--and the old man started teaching me around the same time I was learning to read, so like, two and three years old. Chess is one of the first and only tabletop games I ever learned, and I only started getting really serious about learning it when, predictably, my dad found the right book for me to learn out of, allowing me to make studying it and defeating (killing) him a project I could work on in my own time and through my own imagination.
Though I technically learned to play Super Mario World first, and video games are therefore my first love, as I beame older and more capable, chess took over my ideation and sense of the world in a way that few video games--indeed, few worldly phenomena or cultural apertures--ever have.
That's the crazy thing about chess. So powerful that it is all games, all puzzles, all contests. It is even all stories.
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Around when I started becoming proficient at chess, so, seven and eight years old, my dad had me start reading Plato and Aristotle, and a text intended to enrich and supplement called Ética Para Amador, by Fernando Savater, a Spanish philosopher who wished to create a philosophical primer for his collegues to use with new students, an intimate instruction in ethics for his son, and a modernized, slimmed-down work in the tradition of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, also a text that has been of great importance in my life. Though I did not complete any of these books cover to cover until I was about ten, they put quite a lot of grist into my little mill right away, more than enough to grind on.
Why bring this up? You know me, dear reader--simply reflecting on my childhood. One of my passions, eh? Plus my chess set is near me.
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Also I blame my inability to perform in the modern academy and indeed modernity itself on this early instruction. Once again, like Oskar Matzerath, I had everything I needed early on, and it stunted me profoundly.
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Guess I'll probably read The Tin Drum again sometime soon. It was a really big deal to me when I read it as a teenager. One of the deeper oceans of those years, like East of Eden and One Hundred Years of Solitude and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
One crazy thing I did book-wise was taking my second-ever recreational Adderalls and staying up all night to read Alan Fletcher's The Art of Looking Sideways from cover to cover. Doing this changed my brain permanently. That would have been in college, at age nineteen, which feels at this advanced age like relating some Shakespearean apocrypha; like nineteen-year-old William Blake was in the next dorm room lying on his bed, staring at his ceiling in the dark and weeping silently.
Another crazy book thing I did was read The Silmarillion and The Lord of the Rings and Unfinished Tales and The Hobbit every single year. Now its's every few years. Funny how the landscapes change.
A final crazy book thing is how if I'm having anxiety I might just read like eight thousand pages of George R.R. Martin's words. It is a warm comfort to me, you see, how very many of them there are. The pleasure of their arrangements and their construction is soothing on top of that, and of course, we circle back to chess--very comforting, the chess of his writing, his books, his mind.
With soothing anxiety, a different remedy is listening to Patton Oswalt routines. Something about that voice of his--he just makes me feel calmer, even when he's agitated.
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Good bet a lot of this post is repeating myself. Well, one is bound to, on occasion. That, too, can be comforting to an anxious turn of mind.
--JL
