The Endgame
Newsletter #9 - A Garage Full of Wood
This newsletter looks at issues and events from the endgame point of view. The endgame is a chess concept. In the endgame only a handful of pieces are left on the board. Few moves remain. Victory or defeat is close. Player options are limited and diminishing. Zugzwang is a particularly important aspect of the endgame. It is zugzwang when a player’s only available moves will worsen his position.
Toronto, January 31, 2023
A Garage Full of Wood
How should you think about the endgame when it is not just an abstract concept, but is compellingly personal?
Henry Marsh is old, born in 1950 (okay, he’s not that old). Marsh had a distinguished career in the UK as a neurosurgeon. He has written best-selling books about his work. The New Yorker magazine called him the “Knausgård of neurosurgery.” He has worked extensively in Ukraine and is deeply sorrowful about what has happened to that country.
Now Marsh has advanced prostate cancer. He is no longer a doctor. He is a patient. He has written an honest and contemplative book—called And Finally—about this transition. In an interview he said, “I have crossed to the other side. I have become just another patient, another old man with prostate cancer...” In his book he writes, “I have now joined the great underclass of patients... whose lives are ruled over by doctors. Our lives lurch from scan to scan, in suspended animation, from blood test to blood test.” Marsh says he was “panic struck” and “frightened” when he got his diagnosis.
Henry Marsh is a man of parts. He likes to build things out of wood—staircases, furniture, doll houses for his granddaughters. He prizes rare woods. When he sees a piece of wood he wants, in a lumber yard, or perhaps discarded in a friend’s yard, or by the side of the road, he will take it if he can and store it in his garage with an eye to the future. He’s been doing it for years. He has a garage full of wood.
But Marsh is old and has cancer. What use is a garage full of wood to him now? He writes: “I am constantly having new ideas of things to make with all this wood—but the fact of the matter is, whatever happens, I will not live long enough to use even a fraction of it. I would look at my hoarded wood with deep pleasure, but as old age and decline approach, the pleasure is starting to fade and instead is replaced by a feeling of futility, and even of doom...” The things he does manage to build he regards differently: “I no longer have the excuse of the craftsman—who sees all the faults, often invisible to others, in what he has made—that I will do better next time.”
Is such melancholy appropriate when you are playing your own endgame, rather than observing somebody else’s or considering the concept in the abstract? Is a feeling of futility appropriate when you contemplate what once you thought you would do, and wanted to do, but now expect never to accomplish? Melancholy and feelings of futility are understandable, but they are not inevitable. A next time is always possible—in theory, at least.
Marsh has said he will not write another book. There will be no next time for him. What’s the point? But his three books have been international best sellers. His cancer is in remission. His publisher may well be on the phone one of these days: “Henry, one more, please.” Perhaps, despite his sadness, Henry will oblige.
Sunset in Port Medway, Nova Scotia
P.S. My latest book is Antisemitism: An ancient hatred in the age of identity politics. It will be published on March 7 in Canada and on April 4 in the United States and the United Kingdom. You can pre-order from the publisher, Sutherland House, or from Ben McNally Books. Visit my website. Thanks.