Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011) by Paul Auster, J. M. Coetzee Read Free Book Online

are not only the worms we often appear to be but are also capable of achieving miraculous things—in tennis, in music, in poetry, in science—and that envy and admiration dissolve into a feeling of overwhelming joy. Yes, I agree with you entirely. And that is where the aesthetic and the ethical merge. I have no counter-argument, for I have often felt exactly the same way myself.
With fondest good thoughts,
Paul

April 6, 2009
    Dear Paul,
    Before you tell me what you think of the pleasures of competition, I have a preemptive comment to make.
    In my early twenties I was deeply involved in chess. For years I had been spending my working days writing machine code for computers, getting so deeply sucked into the process that I sometimes felt I was descending into a madness in which the brain is taken over by mechanical logic.
    I had the good sense to abandon computers, and then made my way to the United States to do a graduate degree. Onboard ship crossing the Atlantic (yes, in those days one could travel by sea if one didn’t have much money—the crossing took five days) I entered a chess competition and made it through to the final round, where my opponent was to be an engineering student from Germany named Robert.
    Our match commenced at midnight. At dawn we were still hunched over the chessboard. Robert was one piece up, but I felt I had the tactical advantage. The last few spectators around the board drifted away: they wanted to get a sight of the Statue of Liberty. Robert and I were alone.
    “I’ll give you a draw,” Robert offered. “OK,” I said. We stood up, shook hands, put away the chess set.
    He was a piece up, but I had the advantage: a draw was a fair compromise, not so?
    We docked. I was in the legendary city of New York. But the mood of the contest would not leave me, a mood of cerebral excitement, feverish and slightly sick, like a real inflammation of the brain. I had no interest in my surroundings. Something kept humming inside me.
    My wife and I got through Customs and found our way to the bus station. We were to catch different buses: she would go to Georgia to stay with friends while I went to Austin to find a place for us to live. I said good-bye to her abstractedly. All I wanted was to be alone, so that I could replay the chess game on paper and settle the doubt that nagged me. All the way to Texas in the Greyhound bus (two days? three days?) I pored over my notations, following a hunch that I should never have accepted a draw, that in three or four or five moves Robert the German would have been forced to capitulate.
    I should have been drinking in my first sights of the New World. I should have been making plans for the new life that was opening up before me. But no, I was in the grip of a fever. In a quiet way, I was raving mad. I was the madman in the last row of the bus.
    That episode is what comes to mind when you write about the pleasures of competition. What I associate with competition is not pleasure at all but a state of possession in which the mind is focused on a single absurd goal: to defeat some stranger in whom one has no interest, whom one has never seen before and will never see again.
    The memory of undergoing that fit of nasty exultation, nearly half a century ago, has fortified me forever against wanting to be the winner at all costs, to defeat some or other opponent and come out on top. I have never played chess since then. I have played sports (tennis, cricket), I have done a lot of cycling, but in all of this my aspiration has simply been to do as well as I can. Winning or losing–who cares? How I judge whether or not I have done well is a private matter, between myself and what I suppose I would call my conscience.
    I don’t like forms of sport that model themselves too closely on warfare, in which all that matters is winning and winning becomes a matter of life and death—sports that lack grace, as war lacks grace. At the back of my mind is some ideal—and perhaps