When I was three years old, my parents unintentionally bought me a world. It took the form of a magnetic board, a toy with life. I still remember my late grandmother patiently attending to the needs of my inquiring mind, telling me which letter was "S" and how I should write it on the board. So I learned to read in a very short time. But I was of a complicated nature, I was never willing to write down the words I felt, or anything like that. I had just found a kingdom of my own; everything that obviously did not belong to the world of sounds I converted into my language of magnetic letters and numbers. When I saw a football match on TV, the players became the letters and the goals became the scoreboards (there were already two at the time). I adapted everything I was exploring to my letter soccer game. When I discovered chess, I named a letter player after a chess piece; another had a name derived from Mercury (I was also learning about the planets); another player's name intentionally rhymed with Apollo (I was reading a children's book about Greek mythology). And I learned chess, planets and Greek gods by letter-...