Brain Food #559
Continuing after checkmate
Thoughts of the day
In yesterday’s Brain Food I referenced Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll’s wonderfully strange and slightly mad creation. The book has chess as one of its main themes, and the narrative itself follows certain moves on a chessboard - though not always perfectly - as Alice makes her way across scenes and chapters.
Carroll himself sets up the game of chess in the opening of the book, with the following lines and diagram:
“White Pawn (Alice) to play, and win in eleven moves.”
If only it were that easy.
Chess has witnessed a recent rise in popularity recently thanks to The Queen’s Gambit; but the imaginary tales both of Alice and of Beth Harmon juxtapose what life can truly be like, as opposed to a game of chess. Chess, like life, can teach us how to be reactive, especially in the case of an unexpected move, or how we might have to make small sacrifices for bigger gains; but chess also enables the players to make the best possible choice based on clearly transparent information: the pieces in front of them, laid out on sixty-four squares.
Life, on the other hand, is vast, chaotic, complex, and largely unpredictable, though a good strategy is always useful to have. Even Carroll admitted to having taken some liberties with the logic of the game in the case of Alice. Though the moves in the beginning were predetermined, eventually the story was influenced by Alice’s character.
As the great Isaac Asimov said, “In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.”
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