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| Concorde's Floor, no, not that one... |
Primo Levi's wonderful Other People's Trades (1985) has been accompanying me on this Portuguese odyssey, and what a companion it's proving to be. On every yellowing page is some unassuming few lines that shift your perceptions of the world with such seeming simplicity to leave you wondering how on earth he manages it. His short essay on the relationships between poetry-writing and chess-playing is worth a further mention, and it extends well to all those other professions that lack a blamable intermediary between themselves and their work:
"A game of chess, even played by dilettantes, is an austere metaphor of life and a struggle for life, and the chess player's virtues - reason, memory and invention - are the virtues of every thinking man. The stern rule of chess, according to which a piece that was touched must be moved, and it is not permissible to re-do a move of which one repents, reproduces the inexorability of the choices of the living. When your king, as a result of your inexperience, lack of attention, imprudence, or the opponent's superiority, is ever more closely threatened (but the threat must be enunciated in a clear voice, it is never insidious), cornered and finally transfixed, you cannot fail to perceive a symbolic shadow beyond the chess board. You are living a death; it is your death, and at the same time it is a death for which you are guilty."*
(*Primo Levi, from The Irritable Chess Players, in Other People's Trades, Abacus, 1985, pp131)
