IV. Solo-Chess

The novel “Solo-Chess” was released for free reading as blog-book on http://solochess.wordpress.com, and it is also downloadable at http://www.scribd.com/doc/201432139/Solo-Chess. As for those of you wanting a printed version, there is also the possibility of acquiring it via Lulu, paying strictly for the printing and binding services provided by the specified company.

A small excerpt from the novel:

People are unhappy not because of the lives they live, but because of the lives they know they could live. And as long as they don’t know what they’re missing, they have no reason to question their on-going experiences and to ask themselves if there should be anything more to life than the common hues of grayish pink painting their footsteps in the middle of an ocean of colors each morning. Unhappiness is born in that tiny fraction of a second when our soul gets a glance inside some forbidden to us paradise and we suddenly become aware that what we have is definitely not enough compared to what we’d want, and what we’d want is obviously not meant for us to have, either because someone cut to it right in front of ourselves or because we’re not worthy of that by not even dreaming of it. Thus the fable of the sour grapes was born, and even if there are so many various degrees of sweetness and so many different levels of perceiving it, for each and every single person in this world there is something compared to which the nectar of gods is just some insipid liquor.
For some people the moment of the revelation of their own private Fata Morgana falls bluntly, like the splash of a stone in a lake, ripping apart the tender fragile surface shell of their lives and piercing through all their layers until the bottom of the water. And then they KNOW that they have to do something about that, because in that moment change has already happened within themselves, and they cannot go back to being how they were before it had happened – they’d always know that the stone is somewhere, deep inside of them. For those of them who choose though to still their waters and to pretend that nothing is wrong and that they have the strength to move on without changing anything, Fate has invented the most bitter spice of the human thinking, the ever milestone of their cowardice – the “what if”.
For others the beginning of the process is less destructive apparently, but more overwhelming in time, like a mild rain turning into a deluge. Everybody loves a mild rain, especially during hot summer days for instance, when the sun is burning and when our scorching skin dreams of the warm drops sprayed all over it, refreshing it and removing the Saharan feeling springing from each pore. Sometimes though such a blessing can escalate slowly into abundant showers, sweeping everything in front of them, uncaring of circumstances or consequences. And when it does, those that are dragged away by its’ flow are not to stand straight again soon…
Of course, there’s always the third category of people, those who never become aware of the possibility of the “else” and who go on with their lives each day in a sweetish monotonous lazy inertia, each “tomorrow” being just another carbon copy of “today”. Those are the living proofs of the saying “ignorance is bliss” – they would never feel the curiosity to wander beyond the fence of their reality and venture into the world of dreaming, nothing could pluck them away from their comfortable repetitive day loop. Utterly dispassionate, they just live, without ever feeling or wanting to feel alive.

© 2014 Liliana Negoi