This is Often

For as long as I can remember, my life has been a constant chess match with a depression of varying levels of hunger--depression being the frozen-faced Russian champion, me the jaded hopeful only trying to score a good move or two and secure a few days of clear-sky-headed freedom here or there. 

An understatement: I'm not very good at chess.

Vonnegut, perhaps in literary and gloomy commiseration, has always helped me along: 

“Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies — ‘God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.’ ”

As has Beckett:

"Perhaps it's done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."

There's a reason I get upset when someone makes the insensitive claim that books and art have never helped or changed anyone or anything--because it's soundly false.