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I am thinking about your last letter and how to reply to it, as I do each time.

I don’t know how you do it.

We don’t talk, so I have no idea how you go about it.

When I receive your letters, I always take a day or two.

I read and reread them.

I look for a way in, a handle.

I watch out for the things that connect us, the things that separate us, the things that appear to connect but that in reality separate us—our “correspondences.”

I wonder ultimately what characterizes someone the most, what they show or what they conceal, what they say or what they don’t say, which may not, after all, be the most interesting thing about them.

I try to anticipate as far as possible how you will reply to my reply and how I’ll respond to that.

In other words, I wonder what will tighten the exchange without constricting it, refine the game without closing it off, what will allow me to go forward while allowing you to bounce the ball back and move forward as well.

I’ve already mentioned that I’ve played a lot of chess.

But—and I don’t think I’ve told you this—I’ve played a lot in just this way, by distance, what we used to call “by correspondence,” as opposed to games said to be played “by the clock.” I was a member of a club associated with my high school, in the days long before Internet and e-mail. You would ponder your move, put it in an envelope, and wait for your partner’s move by return post. The games went on for weeks, sometimes months. Marcel Duchamp, who liked nothing better than playing this way, was involved in games that might go on for years, and at that time I was lost in admiration for everything Marcel Duchamp did. (In the last period of his life as an artist, he sent his “readymades” from New York, also by correspondence, with instructions to Suzanne, his sister, who still lived in Paris and assembled them for him. And it was the same with chess! He battled out his best games, some of them with Man Ray, Henri-Pierre Roché, Francis Picabia, like this, without any contact, apparently not touching, another way to avoid being jostled.)

In short, I loved those games of distance chess.

I loved them the way, I believe, Duchamp saw them: less as a match than a game, less of a competition than a way for two people to invent and produce together a work of the mind, with questions, answers, frustrated passions, sudden revivals, shared or hidden flashes of understanding, virtuoso performances, the setting of traps.

I think there’s a remnant of that in the pleasure I derive nowadays from our correspondence. Naturally, there’s also the enjoyment of debating, confessional writing, and the way we push each other to rummage through heaps of secrets. There’s the secret side to this adventure, the fact that up to now we’ve managed to stay in disguise and that nobody knows what we are up to. (By the way, as an aside, in connection with this stealth, about what I was telling you the other day, that practicing secrecy can be equated with the occupation of writing, about this “taste for dressing up and disguise,” which our dear Baudelaire made the core of his literary ethics, I rediscovered a poem by Brecht, written toward the end of Hitler’s rise to power, entitled “Praise of Illegal Work.” It’s about covering your tracks, hiding, multiplying identities, forgetting, losing everything, even your name, and, as if that were not enough, like a literary Mr. Arkadin,* going so far as to recruit paid biographers to discover the last witnesses to a life that can only be misunderstood and must therefore be erased.) Of course, all this counts, but in the growing happiness our correspondence gives me, in the pleasure I experience in reflecting, each time, on my next “strike” and then my impatience in waiting for your “counterattack,” I also have the feeling of going back to the old times of those interminable chess games, which were some of my greatest thrills as a child and adolescent. Their champion in all categories, Jan Timman, a Dutchman,