Gonzo style reporting of the chess scene. >> My own personal conception of existential dread is, like my inability to visualize, idiosyncratic. Many people, I

Gonzo style reporting of the chess scene. >> My own personal conception of existential dread is, like my inability to visualize, idiosyncratic. Many people, I think, are troubled by their own insignificance, preferring not to think about being a tiny part of a vanishing species in what couldn’t even be called a corner of the universe. Not me—I’m fine with that. ... That’s all infinity does, or rather doesn’t do. It doesn’t scare me. >> What does scare me—what provokes real horror in me—is excess reality. I see mental horror—The Void—in the tumbling numbers of securities trading, or the heaps of barely decipherable ancient papyrus dug up in the near Middle East, or the global weather patterns which have evaded, to this date, capture by any mathematical model. I am troubled by the world’s great throngs of data—by thickets of facts I might comprehend individually, but that together make a chaos capable of receding before me as long as I live—the miles of definition leading nowhere. >> That’s what I felt, staring at the board in front of me. I felt like I couldn’t put my pieces anywhere, because I felt like I could put them everywhere, for all eternity. I basically blacked out. These parts are well written and convey his experience on entering the zone. These are negative images coming from the inability to perceive order. There is also the positive part with the state of flow in being absorbed in this alternate world. I like Hikaru No Go, which conveys a sense of being a go player, with the attractions of a game, the competitions, the disappointment in the backdrop of a fantasy story.