I’m Not a Geek

I’m not a geek. Or a nerd. (I’ve tried to discover from my daughters what the difference is. I’m still not sure.)

I played a friend a couple games of chess the other day, and we attempted to assure each other as we sat at Lov-a-Da Coffee that though we were playing chess, in a cafe, with a chess clock, in the middle of the day, and taking it quite seriously, we were not nerds.

Or geeks.

Or whatever.

We figured that a chess geek would be a guy who studied chess strategy and played on-line and stuff. We were not guilty of THOSE infractions. And only a true geek would read a book about chess.

Well, a year or so ago I read a book called The Immortal Game: A History of Chess
by David Shenk. (I’m a sucker for sub-titles, which often give more insight into what a book is about than the title itself. This one is “Or how 32 carved pieces on a board illuminated our understanding of war, art, science, and the human brain.” How can one resist THAT?)

Anyway, I loved every page of it. I even re-created what this book claims is the greatest chess game ever played. In that, I was pushing geekdom.

This is a book about the origins of chess (shrouded in mystery, but very ancient), the mathematics of chess (10 to the 120th power or, 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible games), and, most interestingly, the people of chess.

One example of the latter will suffice:

The artist Marcel Duchamp stunned and changed the art world in the early 20th century by, among other things, displaying and signing and calling it art, a urinal. He mounted a postcard image of the Mona Lisa altered with a mustache and goatee. He grew famous doing it.

But after age 30, he produced almost no art. Chess had become his obsession.

How great an obsession?

Even true love could not moderate his fixation. In 1927 Duchamp married Lydia Sarazin-lavassor, a young heiress. On their honeymoon he spent the entire week studying chess problems. Infuriated, his bride plotted her revenge. When Duchamp finally drifted off to sleep late one night, Lydia glued all of the pieces to the board.

They were divorced three months later.

That, my non-geek friend and I assured one another, was not us.

We played another game.