Learning How to Quit

The first time we played chess, my father taught me how to quit.

I was five. We were sitting across an old coffee table in the basement. It was afternoon—I can remember because of how the light slanted in from the one window in the room. The ceiling showed the rafters, the walls were bare and the floor was poured slab concrete. “Unfinished” is the polite term. A few minutes earlier, my father had said he wanted to show me something.

And he pulled out a piece of wood. No, two pieces of wood, fastened together so they could be folded and opened, checkered black and white, with a hollow interior.

It may be that he talked to me more that day, as he explained how each elegantly carved piece moved across the board, than he would ever talk to me again. Even if I had not fallen in love with the game, chess would have been meaningful to me for that reason alone.

Chess was the only real activity I ever did with my father. It was the one thing this man who was determined to drink himself to death, who hated books, and intellectuals, and people who did not conform to his racial and sexual ideals, would be willing to do with his eldest son, the weird sensitive one who read books.

But I did fall in love with it.

What grace each stylized piece possessed. Each with different attributes, abilities, limitations. And the way the board and pieces were arranged, I soon realized, gave every move meaning. Every move in the opening game allows for such a multiplicity of possibilities for how the game can proceed that we may practically say the possibilities are infinite. But as the game advances, there are fewer, and fewer, and fewer possibilities. Until there are none.

This is what chess can do: offer you the chance to take responsibility for you actions. There’s never an excuse, in chess. There is you and another person and the game you have created together. Against each other. You can’t blame your teammate if you lose, you can’t attribute it to physical injury, there’s no interference.

A good player can retrace the game back many moves to figure out the mistake that allowed the other player to successfully attack them. A good game can last two and a half to three hours, easily. As soon as I in turn taught my younger brother, and then my youngest brother later on, became something the three of us would do whenever we could. It is still the case, though I see them rarely, that when two of us meet, we will play a game of chess. Even if we have only one night together. We learn more about how each other are doing as we play, I think, than we might do even if we stayed up half the night talking. When you play another person, you can see how their mind works and is working. For me, chess is the great personality test.

My father’s personality was immediately evident in the way he played. Brash, devious, and without any hesitation whatsoever to make a sacrifice. I might pause for 15 minutes before making a sacrifice (taking a piece from the other player even though you know they will take that piece as soon as you take theirs). My father truly did not hesitate for even half a second. He was always willing to sacrifice anything at any time. In chess, and in life.

There’s one piece, for those who don’t know, which you can’t sacrifice: your king. The point of the game is to capture the other player’s king. You lose your king, the game is over. This is called checkmate—when there are zero possibilities left in the game. It requires the ability to recognize opportunities across the whole range of pieces, especially when the opposing player does something you did not plan for. Which will always happen, because chess is that complex. It requires extensive strategy, multiple pieces put harmoniously into play, developing distractions, and using the arrangement of the board itself against the other player.

Chess is a noble game. When kings were believed to be the chosen ambassador of God, chess was a game that kings played. So of course there is extensive etiquette. The most important of which, perhaps, is the etiquette around resigning.

A player resigns the game not only to “save face” and avoid the embarrassment of their king formally being captured. Or just to save time. It's also a recognition by the losing player that only through some unthinking mistake on the other player’s part can the losing player still win. Which one does not do, out of respect for them and their well-played game. When you resign, my father showed me, you take your king and lay the piece on its side on the board. This indicates you have given up.

If you have read this far and not given up in boredom or saved this to read for a later time that never comes, I want to apologize again for not putting out the newsletter at its regular time these last few weeks. There has been a lot going on. Even before the election.

Don’t feel despair, I have heard people express to each other. Maybe those who say this are the best of us, whatever Yeats may have written about the end.

It’s not even humanity I care about as much anymore.

No—I do care. Just not as much as before. It’s the other species I care about. The ones who have gone the ones who are going the ones who will go extinct.

There are islands of plastic in the ocean; there are children dying as they attempt to immigrate illegally on a tiny raft from Africa to Europe; drought and insect stressors have caused massive tree die-off in the Western forests I love; hospitals continue to be blown up with US bombs; there are millions of climate refugees; there are millions of acres of the Amazon cut down every year even as like this year an area of the Amazon larger than Costa Rica burned in wildfires; the wealth gap is as great as it was during the gilded age; there are more people in slavery today than ever before in the history of humanity; there are monkeys falling dead out of the trees because of the increased heat in summer; there are over 120 armed conflicts going on in the world…and over 75 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. Fuck.

I am not going to give up. But I may be able to help others—and myself—more if I lay my king on its side, start a new game, and try playing in a new way.