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If Fischer plays in 1975, chess lovers will surely be thankful; if he does not, the game will nevertheless survive —for reasons well expressed in a passage Cockburn quotes from Stefan Zweig's last story, The Royal Game: "Is it not an offensively narrow construction to call chess a game? Is it not a science too, a technique, an art, that sways among these categories as Mahomet's coffin does between heaven and earth, at once a union of all contradictory concepts: primeval, yet ever new; mechanical in operation, yet effective only through the imagination; bounded in geometric space, though boundless in its combinations; ever-developing, yet sterile; thought that leads to nothing; mathematics that produces no result; art without works; architecture without substance, and nevertheless... more lasting in its being and presence than all books and achievements; the only game that belongs to all people and all ages ... to slay boredom, to sharpen the senses, to exhilarate the spirit."
Brad Darrach