As of this week, Ivan’s online chess rating is within six points of his highest ever, a record achieved when he was only eighteen. Every time he begins a new game now, he feels a light buoyant sensation, like his brain is floating up above the game, up to a vantage point very high and refined, from which he can see everything clearly. When a move suggests itself to him for no obvious reason, he need only apply the slightest pressure to his intuition, a few seconds or minutes of conscious calculation, in order to feel the strength of the intuition asserting itself forcefully in response: because after the exchange, for instance – forcing his opponent to withdraw the rook and then taking with the pawn on g5, exposing the light-squared bishop, trading, after all that – then white’s knight will be trapped. And this image, this idea of the trapped knight, was there in Ivan’s mind, unexpressed, not even visualised, but present, folded into itself, preparing to be made real. There inside him, the trapped knight: the hidden idea that manifested its own reality, the idea that created itself. And after the game is over, pacing around his flat, or maybe walking the streets, breathing the cold winter air, breath of his body blossoming into mist, he feels impressed and humbled by the work his brain has done for him, humbled and impressed. Like, thank you, brain, whatever you are. A strange little room in his head where things happen secretly: which in fact seems so impressive it crosses over into being alarming. Of course, he thinks, all his other vital organs also perform their work without his conscious knowledge, carrying out all their various finely calibrated tasks. What makes the brain any different? It has always been Ivan’s philosophy, at least in previous phases of his life, that the brain is indeed different, that the body is merely a sack of flesh and the brain an animating consciousness. But on his walks around the city lately – after long arduous chess games in which his brain has played a role he has not entirely understood – it has occurred to him that perhaps the mind and body are after all one, together, a single being. And that he should be humbled not only by his brain, but by his body also, a complex and beautiful system for the sustenance of life itself. When he and Margaret are together, for instance, the intelligence that animates instinctively his gestures, touching, is that not the same intelligence that suggests to him the move that will later trap the knight? It is the same, himself, his own intelligence, his personhood. And for this he feels a tender wounding gratitude, a sense of blessing, that he exists simply in this body, in this mind, that he is himself, this one person, rich in priceless resources which to his conscious mind remain almost infinitely unknown.