In 2004, [Bobby] Fischer was arrested and detained in Japan for allegedly attempting to travel on a revoked passport. The U.S. government insisted that his passport had been revoked. San Diego attorney Richard Vattuone, a Catholic, flew to Japan to act as counsel for Fischer. After his release, Fischer emigrated to Iceland.-- from an article by Robert Kumpel
Vattuone is intrigued by Fischer's final act. "When I met him in Japan, I gave Bobby a book about G.K. Chesterton, The Apostle of Common Sense. The book covered many matters of culture and religion. I know Bobby had read at least some of the book. Chesterton was a convert and the book contained an article about his conversion. We had also discussed religion."
A site dedicated to G.K. Chesterton, his friends, and the writers he influenced: Belloc, Baring, Lewis, Tolkien, Dawson, Barfield, Knox, Muggeridge, and others.
Friday, February 08, 2008
"I gave Bobby a book about G.K. Chesterton..."
Big News brought to our attention by Sean Dailey @ The Blue Boar:
Wow. It would have been cool if Fischer read Orthodoxy. I was just talking to my father-in-law about how it applied to him:
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Now, if we are to glance at the philosophy of sanity, the first thing to do in the matter is to blot out one big and common mistake. There is a notion adrift everywhere that imagination, especially mystical imagination, is dangerous to man's mental balance. Poets are commonly spoken of as psychologically unreliable... Facts and history utterly contradict this view. Most of the very great poets have been not only sane, but extremely business-like... Imagination does not breed insanity. Exactly what does breed insanity is reason. Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination. . . . The general fact is simple. Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite. The result is mental exhaustion, like the physical exhaustion of Mr. Holbein. To accept everything is an exercise, to understand everything a strain. The poet only desires exaltation and expansion, a world to stretch himself in. The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.
http://www.cse.dmu.ac.uk/~mward/gkc/books/orthodoxy/ch2.html