Quiet people are like quiet grandmasters. They ask: “What is the best move?” In a world with 64 squares and about 10^120 possible positions, it must surely be hard to find. A computer might take a minute, all the atoms in the observable universe—if they were to pair up and exchange turns every second—might take trillions and trillions of years, a human might have to consult a clock and sing a hallelujah. In a world with a thin layer of water and land, with courts, churches, laboratories, and museums, the best move eludes the realm of capture altogether. Those who cannot let go throw up their hands and echo the Socratic exclamation: “I know nothing!” And then they sit, like the grandmasters, and palm their cheeks and purse their lips and cross their legs and let their eyes lose focus on the floor or the ceiling.
The game of chess is due in any talk of quiet because it is quiet. Intelligence, the labor of the game, neither speaks nor shouts. Its most transcendent form knows the best among an infinite number of moves and sees beyond the thousandth dimension of a chess board, passing through squares within squares within squares without mistaking them for a white and black illusion. Before this all-knowing intelligence, whatever intelligent move has to be played will never be played, and whatever is played already invites a horde of criticism. Intelligent people thus admit that their intelligence is a mere fractal whisper that informs, and they refrain from beating it to the least tenable point whenever they can. They keep a tight rein on their knights and horses, so to speak, so that hooves and manes would not wander to the blades of sharper opponents.
Although they may not be intelligent themselves, quiet people share the same fear of blunders that intelligent people have. But instead of eventually opening up the ranks and risking checkmate for a chance of checkmate, they play their queens and kings too close to the vest, always thinking of the move after the move in a never-ending sequence. So they cannot let go of the best move, like Socrates, as much as they cannot let go of their regal pieces. They love them so much because they represent the loftiest of their ideas. They are the stacked arguments behind their suppositions and beliefs, the purpose behind all their strategies. They cannot imagine losing them in any way other than a foolish way. To protect them always, quiet people stay undecided, and quiet.
But perhaps they have good reasons to be quiet. People who think in circles remember their histories more than anything else. They look back to that time in their childhood, when they insulted a man with a cleft lip, and think it was stupid; to that time in their teens, when they insulted a math teacher who had made an error, and think it was stupid; to that time in their twenties, when they insulted Abraham for agreeing to sacrifice his son Isaac, and think it was stupid. And if they can think of more blunders in the past, they can think of more of them in the future. Who dares talk when the word of God created the world and the world is not entirely free from corruption?
Loud people, by contrast, will certainly beat quiet people in chess. Even if they are calculating at one move per hour, they are not slow enough not to move forever. Actually, they are very quick thinkers. They follow their brains to where their brains take them, and they sacrifice everything for the sake of fun. They push their pawns, whip their horses, and send forth their queens to the line of scrimmage, often with ten hours left on the clock. They may be blundering all or most of their moves, but at least they are playing. Of course, they are ruthlessly impatient, too, and I mean they will beat quiet people in the literal sense. Unending indecision on the board ought to be paddled, maybe with the hardwood of the board itself.
Not wanting to be paddled by anything, those who are quiet often situate themselves in the shadows of loud people. They can be seen at the back of groups, on the corners of cafeterias, on top of stairwells, and in secret alcoves in between bookshelves in libraries. These are convenient spots where they can gather facts and hear dialogues so they can toss them into their running wheels. In the shadows, they can process all the loudness and quietness that they get and ferment them into opinions that they will never sully by opining.
No matter how their snobbish silence makes it seem, quiet people never claim to be above the world’s ruckus. They simply belong to that coven where a whisper is the loudest thing that can be said. This is the same coven that dead poets, philosophers, and writers belong to—dead people who cannot whisper but can always let their legacies do all the loud talking for them. In this coven, quiet people can host the spirits of the greatest and deadest thinkers of the past. They can read their works on the couch or under a tree and get lost in some foreign land, where all blunders have already been made and nothing can ever go wrong. It is preferable to be in made-up worlds with long-buried minds; everyone can live little and die grand, which is what most quiet people aspire to do.
Back in the world of the living, quiet people admit to the capital blunder of not moving a piece. In the game of chess (just as in real life), time awaits no man. The grim scythe of the Reaper falls to all. On the board, grandmasters who are running out of time must make hay while the sun shines at the cost of making a terrible move they would otherwise not have made. They must hit their clocks and beat their intelligence to some healthy degree. Meanwhile, the quietest of the quiet have thrown away the clock and imprisoned themselves in the square outside the squares, and thus, their pieces are imprisoned with them until their intelligent opponents leave. Then they start playing without playing against themselves, which leads to the deterioration of the mind and the asylum.
The other capital blunder from too much quietness is the blunder of allowing tyranny. Proper, intelligent people know this and have long equipped themselves with the powers of articulation, sophistry, and rhetoric—to be used like a cocked fist in a boxing match that lands either as a swift attack or counterattack. With their mouths bound by the perfect word and their pieces bound by the perfect move, quiet people often oppressed themselves by instead keeping everything to themselves, and in doing so they oppressed the human race. They hem and haw on the right things that must be said when they must be said. They neither defend nor attack. They become pawns in a game played by the loud and the intelligent people, who may or may not be good people.
What will forever be the redeeming factor of quiet people, though, is humility. If it takes a bullish stance and an aggressive mind to fly at all things that should not be flown at, it takes tremendous respect for the world to be quiet. It has been said that chess, with its cosmic complications, is not for the faint-hearted. Quietness and the phenomenon of letting things come and go in the theater of the mind without giving them access to the mouth are not for the faint-hearted either. To opine and pontificate are the easiest fuels for the ego. Words do not need to be mined or fracked or siphoned. They can be uttered out of the thrill of beating the intelligence to something instantly gratifying yet harmful. And there is pride in capturing intelligence, or a fraction of it, through hasty speech, especially when it can be echoed by people all over the world, who talk in ones and zeros in the ether. Humility is the opposite of such pride. It is a high value that lowers. Quiet people who only think their way through life nevertheless always peg their attention to an ideal and humble themselves before it.
Like quiet grandmasters, quiet people may realize that relying on the astrolabe of their genius and faith is the better way to play chess. They may begin to move their pieces for the first time and learn that queens and kings are made to be moved and not stared at. They may start to lose a thousand matches and yet find meaning in playing at the highest level they can. Moved by the ticking clock and the thinning lifespan, they may accept that the best move in chess must be made by a human, not by an all-knowing machine.
And so, like quiet grandmasters, quiet people must be human. They must move their pieces, advance, fianchetto, skewer, pin, fork, check, and double-check. They must promote a pawn to a queen or even a knight, if the state of play demands it. They must speak, argue, and move where the brain takes them if life demands it. In playing the game for the win by maneuvering all their units to one cohesive attack and firing on all fronts with a symphony of bazookas, they may just hear themselves saying all that can be said quite enough.
