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  • The American Scholar

    Commonplace Book

    Mar 02, 2020 4 minutes
    Collected by Anne Matthews

    The pawn is the soul of chess.

    —François-André Danican Philidor, Analysis of the Game of Chess, 1749

    But only when I am wrapped, naked, by these soft spring clouds of evening steam, as now, do I feel I could well become someone from a past age. The steam envelops me but not so densely that the visible world is lost to view; neither is it a mere thin, silken swath that, were it to be whipped away, would reveal me as a normal naked mortal of this world.

    —Natsume Sōseki, 1906, tr. by Meredith McKinney

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