Who knows what he thought when Henry James Byron wrote at Our boys his famous answer “Life is too short for chess.” Perhaps I was thinking of his father's cousin, the great poet Lord Byron, who quickly made those of this world. The first time he had sex was at age 9, published his first poem at age 19, traveled all over Europe and died at age 36 in Greece. The fever and the ill-done extractions had been due to the symbol of romanticism dying so young.

In Lord Byron's carpe diem lifestyle, there was no room for chess or the protagonist of Henry James Byron's theater. Life was too short. Even the fiercest chess player will accept this, although they will look for another meaning for the quote. Life is not long enough for chess, for mastering the game.

Chess has the curse of the wheel of the witch. The deeper you delve into the game, the more precision you lack to learn. We can make continuous progress, hoping that one day we will be satisfied, but along the way we will find other obstacles. Sooner or later, we'll have to recognize that not one or two lives, chess cannot be fully controlled, and ours will be an endless learning process.

For example, endroke. At first it seems like a simple thing. When the king and the tower have not moved by the initial paintings, the first can take two steps to one side and the tower of that corner is placed on the other side. Precisely, beginners are often repeated that one of the first things to do in the game is to put the king under cover, for which it is best to get rid of it as soon as possible and take it aside.

But there will be a point where exceptions will appear, and then it is over. For example, by looking carefully at the games of the leading players, we will learn that there are exceptions to the orders for the king to be guided as soon as possible. In one of the most spectacular chess games, Anderssen-Kieseritzky, the German teacher did not take note of it and yet beat his rival in 23 plays.

Someone might say that Adolf Anderssen is a symbol of the romantic game style and his parties are not modélic. There are many other cases. In the seventh match of Cap₡-Alekhine, the Cuban champion of the world did not move from the initial frame throughout the match and was imposed on 28 plays. Capablanca was the most orthodox of the Orthodox players, which shows that the principles such as the endroaching have many cracks. What's more, we can almost say that exceptions triumph over chess rules.

I think something similar happens with languages. At a given moment, we will realize that as we approach knowledge, we have to take into account smaller and smaller nuances. The consequence will be like the one that came out in chess: even if we strive, we will never succeed in mastering a language. Did I write to submit again? Euskaltzaindia has this form as a limit, better if she had put her to study well.

The order of the phrases shows infinite nuances. Both in chess and in rapid sighting is one of the basic principles of order languages. In Basque, without going any further, the Subject – Complementary – The Word (S-O-A) is learned in neutral order and, despite the new methods, in the initial steps this type of sentence prevails: The child is in the cradle, Irati has bought a new van, Thomas has passed the test.

Well, in reading high-level texts it is clear that writers often do not use this criterion. Without having to swallow the entire corpus, just take a newspaper or any book to get the cracks out of the S-O-A succession. In the anthological story, Iban Zaldua repeatedly breaks the unmarked order of leaving the verb in the last position: “In the face of this, the narrators diagnosed him with an invasion of intestinal worms, a fluvial novel composed of five volumes.”

Once again, there will be those who say that Iban Zaldua has his own style and that his works are not framed in traditional methods. There are more examples. In the book Aitaren etxea by Karmele Jaio the verb is not always in the last position and last year he won the Euskadi Prize, equivalent to the world championship in Basque letters. What the hell, then? Will we never learn our own language? I suspect that life is too short also for languages. Between exceptions and nuances, we will always have something to see, something to think about and something to learn.

We don't get angry. And it's that these breaks of principle are the ones that make languages and chess attractive, as they move away from rigidity and make way for creativity. Creativity makes the world more enjoyable and, in the end, every sentence or play is a work of creation.

If life is short, let's build a wider world. With words and pieces. With our imagination. A game, Lord Byron?