Ben Franklin knew value of royal game
Saturday, January 2, 2010 3:00 AM
By SHELBY LYMAN
Chess has an appeal with seemingly deep roots in the human situation.
In his late-18th-century essay “The Morals of Chess,” Benjamin Franklin declared that life is a variation of the game.
“We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources,” he said.
“The game is so full of events, . . . and one so frequently, after long contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one’s self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty.”
Janice and Don Hawkins of Windsor, N.Y., a couple in their 60s who are infrequent players, recently dusted off their chess set and began to play after a long furlough from the board.
Janice e-mailed me a few days later with the following observation:
“Chess truly is so much like life,” she said. “Just when you think life is going in the right direction, ‘something’ comes up to throw you a curve, and you have to formulate your life plan all over again.”
Her words will never appear in an anthology, but — more than 200 years later — they are clearly in the spirit of old Ben’s.
Here is the full article.
“We learn by chess the habit of not being discouraged by present appearances in the state of our affairs, the habit of hoping for a favourable change, and that of persevering in the search of resources,” he said.
It is obvious Franklin never played Garry Kasparov.
While visiting my wife’s parents in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area, we went to see the Benjamin Franklin Exhibit at the Minnesota History Center near the State Capitol in St. Paul. Chess figured large in the exhibit:
() They had a chess set used by Franklin.
() Several of the main large-type wall legends featured quotations by or on Franklin and chess.
() There was an animated reading of an essay in which Franklin personified his Gout reproaching him for his diet and sedentary ways (text online here): “But what is your practice after dinner? Walking in the beautiful gardens of those friends with whom you have dined would be the choice of men of sense; yours is to be fixed down to chess, where you are found engaged for two or three hours! This is your perpetual recreation, which is the least eligible of any for a sedentary man, because, instead of accelerating the motion of the fluids, the rigid attention it requires helps to retard the circulation and obstruct internal secretions. Wrapt in the speculations of this wretched game, you destroy your constitution.”
() And most of all, they had an “Interactive” where one selects a situation in Franklin’s life plus an aspect of how he approached it, such as “Vision”, “Cunning”, “Restraint”, “Compromise”. Each combination begins with an illustration from chess, then shows how Franklin applied it. An item on this part of the exhibit when it toured to Denver in 2007 is here.
A text of Franklin’s essay “The Morals of Chess” is online gracias a’ Metajedrez.com.
ChessBase had an item about Franklin in 2006—with further links including the original “Tercentenary” version of the exibit.
It’s too bad none of Franklin’s games seem to have been preserved—see John McCrary’s excellent and authoritative essay for the Franklin Tricentenary (as linked by ChessBase). (Done while killing time waiting for one of my chess computer calculations to finish, with the exciting bowl game on between Susan’s Texas Tech and Michigan State—where I have close math friends, don’t know which team to root for, hmmm…:-)
Ben Franklin liked the women. He had many affairs at once.
The man never wasted time!