Our Subject

Sasha Chapin’s All the Wrong Moves: A Memoir About Chess, Love, and Ruining Everything attempts to share hard earned wisdom through the lens of chess. With a blend of vulnerability, humor, and linguistic flair, Chapin recounts his descent into a crippling chess addiction. He wrestles with sibling dynamics and mental health, with being a misfit among misfits and a stranger in a foreign land. He strives under the tutelage of grandmasters, falls in love a few times, and ultimately ruins everything. There are nuggets of deep reflection throughout, and a satisfying conclusion, both narratively and philosophically. It is truly quite the accomplishment, and I highly recommend that any interested readers drop this, and read Chapin’s memoir instead.

I have a story to tell that is both more tedious and less profound. It begins under an oak tree, its shadow creeping across the pages of my borrowed copy of All the Wrong Moves. I am engrossed by Chapin’s journey to India, the mythical birthplace of chess. His goal was to find the goddess of chess, Caïssa. Instead of what he sought, Chapin found sesame milk and gastronomical agony. That and, relatedly, many increasingly embarrassing losses on the board.

He continues on, discussing his love life in the aftermath of his failed pilgrimage. Then he mentions a few of his less narratively satisfying tournament appearances off hand before moving on to his last tournament. He engages in some minor chemical warfare, and ponders life while walking a beach. Although this was the climax of the story, it was not the peak of my emotional investment. That had happened outside the confines of the story, on a picnic blanket in the park. I had been struck, dazed even, by the smallness of the world and the largeness of libraries.

𝅘𝅥𝅯 it’s a small world, Ego Death 𝅘𝅥𝅯

If I were to write a memoir about my own experiences in the chess subculture, a tournament called the Manhattan Open would take up a significant portion. I competed many times throughout my teenage years, and it became the backdrop of many treasured memories: The dirty, delicious, now defunct pizza joint at the end of the subway exit ramp where I habitually ate lunch, both days of the tournament, year after year. The comradery of peers during post mortems or blitz breaks. The unexpected run-ins with former pupils wanting to prove that they had in fact become the masters. Reading about Sasha’s adventures had brought many of my fondest chess memories, these included, to the fore. One of his less narratively interesting outings, meriting only a sentence or two, was said to have taken place in Manhattan. I wondered - could Chapin have been alluding to that same tournament?

I did not have to stay curious for long. The results of all official chess tournaments, from the world championship to weekly meetings in church basements, are recorded and posted publicly online. I searched for Chapin on the US Chess Federation’s website, and was quickly able to spot the 16th Annual Manhattan Open in his relatively short tournament history. Instantly, I was transported - I could smell the carpet of the Hotel Pennsylvania. The sounds of birds were replaced with the hustle and bustle of Penn Station, thumping steps and ringing bells. Hiding behind one innocuous sentence was a treasure trove of my own past. I found myself sitting in the Skittles Room - the room at a tournament dedicated to socializing and kibitzing between games - surrounded by hundreds of people. This lofty, echoey space suddenly seemed much, much larger. Unbeknownst to me, I had been engaging intimately with just one of those people, listening to him boast about his greatest prides and confide his shortcomings. It made the entire population of that room, not just this one person, much more meaningful.

The memory was forever transformed for me. The perspective change is easily explainable but extraordinary nevertheless - all of the other individuals in that room with me changed from objects to subjects. Not objects as in inanimate objects - objects as in “a person or thing to which a specified action or feeling is directed” (the 2nd definition on Google). To me, Chapin was a subject, the protagonist of his own memoir. It seemed inappropriate for him to be a subject in some places and an object in others, so Chapin - along with every other person in the room - became a subject in my memory.

The enormity of this flip in perspective cannot be understated. If you spend lots of time with cool people or consume lots of the work of Michael Pollan, you will eventually encounter the idea of ego death. I was initially very turned off by the term. Why would you want your self to die? As I learned more about it those feelings were minimized but never completely dissipated. Until this moment, under the oak tree. I would not say that I experienced ego death, but I think that after my perspective change, I understand what it is and why it might be desirable.

The Largeness of Libraries

In the aftermath of my experience, I was hounded by one recurring thought - what were the odds of it happening to me? I found Chapin’s book while wandering the deserted stacks of a Colorado library. I picked it up because I liked the art on the spine. In that book, I found myself hiding in the background. If I searched hard enough, could I find myself in other books? How many of their stories so closely touch my own? I’m tempted to conclude that there probably aren’t that many. I am young, and have not had much time to make my mark on the world. Plus, I would naturally be pulled towards relatable narratives. It is not shocking that a book that I ultimately chose because of its proximity to my interests would intersect with my own life.

I think that this line of reasoning is mostly correct, but ultimately misguided. Finding myself between the pages made the world feel much smaller, but finding the narrative and its subject in my own memories had an opposite effect. I was asking the wrong question. Instead of interrogating probabilities, I should be appreciating the tapestry of human experience flowing through that building. Not trying to quantify the intersection points with my own life, each a single thread, but instead admiring the collective humanity that bursts from each and every item on each and every shelf. This weaving, composed of all moments of all lives affected by and reflected in each work, is gargantuan. Yet, this web of threads can fit inside a building. Further, adults and children alike can stroll right through it without even noticing, much less becoming entangled. Now that I have noticed it, and acknowledged my place in it, I am going to have a much harder time navigating libraries.