---| Herman Hesse - The Chess Player |---


GUIDANCE IN THE BUILDING UP OF THE PERSONALITY.
SUCCESS GUARANTEED


This seemed to me to be worth looking into and I went in at this door.
I found myself in a quiet twilit room where a man with something like a
large chessboard in front of him sat in Eastern fashion on the floor. At
first glance I thought it was friend Pablo. He wore at any rate a similar
gorgeous silk jacket and had the same dark and shining eyes.

"Are you Pablo?" I asked.

"I am not anybody," he replied amiably. "We have no names here and we are
not anybody. I am a chess player. Do you wish for instruction in building
up your personality?"

"Yes, please."

"Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal."

"My pieces--?"

"Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up.
I can't play without pieces."

He held up a glass to me and again I saw the unity of my personality
broken up into many selves whose number seemed even to have increased. The
pieces were now, however, very small, about the size of chessmen. The
player took a dozen or so of them in his sure and quiet fingers and placed
them on the ground near the board. As he did so he began to speak in the
monotonous way of one who goes through a recitation or reading that he has
often gone through before.

"The mistaken and unhappy notion that man is an enduring unity is known to
you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of souls, of
numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality into these
numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the name
schizophrenia for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity
may be dealt with unless there is a series, a certain order and grouping.
It is wrong insofar as it holds that one only and binding and lifelong
order is possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error
of science has many unpleasant consequences, and the single advantage of
simplifying the work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving
them the labors of original thought. In consequence of this error many
persons pass for normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of
society, who are incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked
upon as mad who are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect
psychology of science by the conception that we call the art of building
up the soul. We demonstrate to anyone whose soul has fallen to pieces that
he can rearrange these pieces of a previous self in whatever order he
pleases, and so attain to an endless multiplicity of moves in the game of
life. As the playwright shapes a drama from a handful of characters, so do
we from the pieces of the disintegrated self build up ever new groups,
with ever new interplay and suspense, and new situations that are
eternally inexhaustible. Look!"

With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my
pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful and
sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on his
board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and families,
games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small world. For a
while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through its evolutions
before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making treaties and fighting
battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was indeed a crowded stage,
a moving breathless drama.

Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the
pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artistŐs skill, made up a
new game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships and
entanglements. The second gamehad an affinity with the first, it was the
same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time
changed, the motif as differently given out and the situations differently
presented.

"This is the art of life," he said dreamily. "You may yourself as an
artist develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may
complicate and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as
madness, in a higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is
schizophrenia the beginning of all art and all fantasy. Even learned men
have come to a partial recognition of this, as may be gathered, for
example, from Prince Wunderhorn, that enchanting book, in which the
industry and pains of a man of learning, with the assistance of the genius
of a number of madmen and artists shut up as such, are immortalized. Here,
take your little pieces away with you. The game will often give you
pleasure. The piece that today grew to the proportions of an intolerable
nuisance, you will degrade tomorrow to a mere lay figure. The luckless
Cinderella will in the next game be the princess. I wish you much
pleasure, my dear sir."

I bowed low in gratitude to the gifted chess player, put the little
pieces in my pocket and withdrew through the narrow door.


(Herman Hesse, from Steppenwolf)

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