Chess is the magic life of symbols. Dynamic, turbulent, vital and inexhaustible, it is a storm of intensities that incarnates itself in a process or language that is not one of words, music, dance, gymnastics, or architecture, and yet is all of these in an allegorical manner composed of a certain movement with a complex structural genesis and meaning.
How could the initiate not "vibrate" to the many echoes and nuances of life, art and struggle that chess generates in its swirling rhapsody of thrust and distillation, tumult and consummation, a vortex rising into a crescendo of urgencies that cannot be denied, with a finality that reaches out to the eternal? No one who has been kissed by its terrible lips of midnight can forget, nor dispel ever the fever of its crimson possessiveness.
Yes, Caissa would ever be the jealous mistress who would command the tribute of a fealty that knows no bounds, the muse whose fatal embrace condemns the victim to a destiny of lunacies and brilliancies, exuberance and excess, breathless pursuer of that nameless splendor that ceaselessly haunts and enchants.
Yes, chess has its own irresistible magic. Not only has it "the power to make people happy", but chess also has the power to drive them to that point of joyful madness and exhaustion, where at last, like a metaphysics of the unknown, they can feel the vibrations of the invisible, that realm of transcendence where finally another life, another history is waiting to soar and unfold.
Like music, poetry, love and wine, chess is a sparkle of infinity on earth. (From Chess Asia, Vol. 14 No. 2)