“He could never free his mind of this game”

On Chess: Luminary enjoyed many a good fight
Saturday, January 22, 2011 02:51 AM
The Columbus Dispatch
Shelby Lyman

A world champion for 26years, Emanuel Lasker was a towering figure. It speaks well of chess that he should find so much in it.

His friend, Albert Einstein, who described Lasker as one of the most interesting people he had met, saw a tragic note in this passion.

“He could never free his mind of this game,” Einstein said, “even when he was occupied by philosophical and humanitarian problems.”
Lasker saw the chessboard as an arena in which humanity might show its best qualities.

“There is magic,” he said, “in the creative chess master.”

In his philosophical tome Struggle, Lasker wrote that life and chess mirror each other. The common denominator, he said, was “what human nature mostly delights in: a fight.”

A visitor to his home of later years might be ushered before a chess table and challenged by the aging grandmaster, who would make a move and declare: “Defend yourself.”

Lasker was an avowed disciple of what is true. Conventional education, he said, was “frightfully wasteful of time and values.”

In chess and in life, he declared, one should seek out challenges, not avoid difficult tasks.

Chess legend Jose Capablanca once labeled Lasker as “the most profound and imaginative player I have ever known.”

Source: http://www.dispatch.com