Welcome!

I know you have many choices to support your view of reality; thanks for choosing shut-it-down. (See my first post for the etymology.)

Wednesday, February 13, 2008

Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad (Bobby Fischer, Part 2)

[This is an addendum to an earlier post, Bobby Fischer.]

I just ran across this post, "Was It Only a Game?" on Dick Cavett's blog. I think Cavett's essay is just a beautiful piece of writing, and together with the clip of his first interview with Fischer (sumer of 1971, prior to the Spassky match) give a more nuanced and complex (and sympathetic) impression of an earlier, quite different intellect from the later raving paranoid Fischer became.
For those who choose not to read Cavett's post, I have to at least say that Cavett closes his essay by discussing those who did not have "a good death," and includes the closing lines from an E.E.Cummings poem, with no title but referred to by its first three words: “Buffalo Bill’s / defunct”:
Jesus
he was a handsome man

and what I want to know is

how do you like your blue-eyed boy
Mister Death
**********
Incidentally, the title of this post is, according to Wikiquote, an "Anonymous ancient proverb, wrongly attributed to Euripides."

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