A chess genius is a human being who focuses vast, little-understood mental gifts and labors on an ultimately trivial human enterprise.
Each new historical era mirrors itself in the picture and archive mythology of its past or of a past borrowed from other cultures. It tests its sense of identity, of regress or new achievement, against that past.
It is not the literal past that rules us, save, possibly, in a biological sense. It is images of the past.
The journalistic vision sharpens to the point of maximum impact every event, every individual and social configuration but the honing is uniform.
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