Bobby Fischer Against The World (2011)

I could never play chess. Not well, at least. I remember when I was a very young boy, my cousin (I think) taught me how to play chess and, in the summers in Tambaram Sanatorium in Chennai, which my parents subjected me to every summer, he explained to me the rules, how all the pieces moved, how players took turns to move just one piece at a time. As soon as we started playing — I think it must have been a handful of moves in — he castled, and I said, “You can only move one piece at a time. That’s what you said.” He said, “No this is a standard move, it’s allowed.” That’s when I gave up. Years later, on vacation, playing against Leo in Analândia, São Paulo (that weekend we were both guests of our mutual friend João) I lost game after game, while the Sombra, the house cat, watched on, I imagine in disapproval.

I watched Pawn Sacrifice (2014) starring Tobey Maguire and Liev Schreiber many years ago. Both, I thought, played their parts marvellously. I enjoyed here, in particular, the documentary footage of the Fischer-Spassky match of 1972, and this documentary completes the picture I had of that game wonderfully.

I admire so much that chess has a language of it’s own, a culture that is completely alien to me but nevertheless whole. That there is a community separated by the language of day-to-day life but united by this common, alien vernacular. That there are people speaking in tongues I don’t understand — in much the same way that I seem to some friends, perhaps — about things that I will never appreciate as much as they do. The sensitivity to little things is, perhaps, the thing I resonate so strongly with. With many of the struggles that mathematicians and physicists have typically when they are discussing the details of their work, ordinary language fails. Language seems unable to capture the depth, the intensity, and the significance of particular movements. I felt, joyously, my inadequacy, my own limitations.

Without saying too much about his decline, Fischer seems to be the sort of person that is completely abhorrent to the idea of living life on anyone else’s terms. I can think of few characters in history that are similar: Alexander Grothendieck, Grigori Perelman perhaps, but few others.