Marginalia, no.8

Believing one has no choice is not the same thing as believing one is doing the right thing.

~ David Rieff

Rieff recently wrote a memoir on the death of his mother, Susan Sontag.  At some emotional cost to himself, he felt he had to humor her belief that she wasn’t actually dying.  But the quote also struck me as a nice epigrammatic summary of a lesson forced on me as a boy just learning to playing chess.