Epilogue

The solution to the Happy Ending Problem came at the end of my exposure to chess, which I still love to a degree, but it was even more so in my childhood. I believe it to be perfect insomuch as a game can be. It taught me a great many things: patience, forbearance, and the limitations of mathematical merit -- geometry, what a ruleset, as I would later come to fully recognize.

The point of any game, I believe, is to transcend it, and that is exactly what needed to happen for me me at least -- something had to give. I was more or less homeless, living on the school’s campus in a sort of economic stalemate. Instead of worrying about a lack money, or my unlucky positioning in the world, I just played. It was my one worldly ambition to become a champion chess player. I beat our president, and famous players such as Joseph Blackburn, Henry Bird, and Allison Yeux. I practiced relentlessly every day; the fervor of humanity for this, my desired goal. One day I finally had the opportunity to attend a tournament in Berlin. I saw the masters -- one, shabby, snuffy and blear-eyed; another, a badly-fitting would-be spectacle, shoddy; a third, a mere parody of humanity, and so on and so forth for the best. These were the people whose ranks I was seeking admission. ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes Meredith Kabah’ I exclaimed to myself in disgust, and there and then I registered I would never play another serious game of chess again.


---Meredith Kabah, “Memoirs.”