"“One can think,” Jake mused over the chessboard. “If thought is desirable. For me it was a curse, an obsession, like chess. Always the intellectual yearning to be the man of action. To be, like Brutus, a fulcrum of history. That was denied me until one day when I—acted. I’ll never know whether I was right at the wrong time for my own sake or wrong at the right time for the sake of history.”"