Users of Diversity: The UNL Chesterton Society

Stop the Office!

2009-05-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

The last post I wrote on the office was written before I actually watched an episode. After watching an episode, I found that it is a very unchaste show and should not be recommended. Sorry for that mix-up.

What We Learned This Week

2009-04-26T18:26:00.001-07:00

1. That there are two kinds of occupations: eternal ones and temporal ones. To test a given occupation for category status, ask if the reality of the occupation is more or less important than the reality of the occupaiton of playing. For examople, the occupaiton of shopkeeping is less important than the occupation of playing, though the fact that one makes money by shopkeeping may be important enough that they do it instead of playing. Motherhood, on the other hand, is more important than playing.

2. Three reasons art must have limits:
A. The more the limits, the greater the achevement of the artist.
B. Without limits, an artist loses his creativity.
C. The more a work of art is a single thing, the better it is. And being a single thing also implies that there are a great many things that the work is not.

Go The Office!

2009-04-17T08:42:00.000-07:00

In the latest issue of "Gilbert" (the magazine of the American Chesterton Society), there is an article on Chestertonian Economic themes in The Office.

So, for all you Office fans out there, if you ever have to choose between reading Chesterton and watching The Office...Watch The Office.

And now I feel like I just misspelled Office over and over.

To all you Husker fans...

2009-03-22T14:18:00.001-07:00

Have you ever wondered WHY you like the Huskers? Read "The Napoleon of Notting Hill" (by Chesterton of course) to find out.

-1

2009-03-10T06:44:00.000-07:00

Dale Alquhist's talk was great! He went over the book "What's wrong with the World" and how it's still relevant to our lives today. He also included a lot of anecdotal Chesterton stories. We can have a discussion about the talk in the comments boxes.

Blastoff!

2009-03-09T07:52:00.001-07:00

Todays the Day!!! Whoopee!

Countdown

2009-03-08T14:48:00.000-07:00

Only 1 more day until Dale Alquhist's speech!

My worst nightmare: globs of goo rolling around and a skinny needle thing that says "one." The needle thing was the scary part, not the globs of goo.

Countdown

2009-03-06T08:02:00.001-08:00

Only THREE more days until Dale Alquhist's visit.

Three is the perfect number, being the number of the Trinity, the Triangle, and the meals of the day (except for hobbits and the English, and the Italians, that is. The hobbits have 6-7, the English have four, and the Italians have one. But the Italian meal lasts all day long.)

By the way, I will not be posting on numbers two and one. You'll have to use your imagination.

Countdown

2009-03-05T09:54:00.000-08:00

Only FOUR more days until the Student Union Auditorium is filled with people to hear about Chesterton...I hope.

Did you ever notice that the word Four has Four letters in it? Or that you can make a 4 from four sticks of equal length?

I don't know what Chesterton would say about the number four, but I bet it would be along the lines of

"Four men, and no women, are enough to form a club. For four is a crowd, and if there is a crowd, there is the possibility of speaking to nobody in particular, which is a necessary element of masculine conversation."

(If you don't understand that imaginary quote, you need to go read "What's Wrong with the World." And hurry. You have four days.)

Sorry, ladies, but I couldn't think of anything else Chestertonian relating to the number four.

Countdown

2009-03-04T08:07:00.001-08:00

Five Days Left Till Dale's Visit! Woo Hoo! Go Big...wait a minute...

Actually, red was Chesterton's favorite color.

And now for a Sesame Street Style presentation on the Number Five.

(To be read out loud)

''''' 5
lllll 5
<<<<< 5
55555 Fifty Five thousand, five hundred and fifty-five.

pub?

2009-02-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

What/where was Chesterton's favorite pub again?

not exactly Chesterton, but...

2009-02-27T14:24:00.000-08:00

I think Chesterton would approve of this Lewis inspired project--details at www.infernalfiles.com

It's a Catholic competition of evangelization.

Idea Search

2009-02-18T07:30:00.000-08:00

Please comment on what we should have and should not have at our table when Dale comes. You see, our organization will (or ought to have) a table in front of the door to the audiotorium. Here's some ideas to get you started.

Gilbert! magazine

A Gilbert! magazine subscription form

A UNL Chesterton Society membership form (all I need is name and e-mail)

A list of Chesterton e-resources

What's Wrong with the World (the book)

This might cost money, which might be a problem.

Poster Progress

2009-02-12T11:47:00.000-08:00

We're hoping to get a poster for Mr. Alquhist's visit in every building on campus. Here's what we've got so far.

Oldfather hall
Henzlik
Psychology,
English,
Woods Art building
Avery chemistry
Big Big chemistry
Teacher's college hall
Westbrook music building
Student Union
Newman Center
CBA

Corrections

2009-02-06T18:15:00.000-08:00

You who get my e-mails know that I always mess up on something. Well, I did it again. Dale Alquhist's talk starts at 7:30, not 8. Sorry for the confusion.

Dale Alqhist is Coming

2009-02-06T12:07:00.000-08:00

Save the date: March 9 at 8 pm (I think) in the UNL student union audiotorium. If you'd like to help, put how I can get in touch with you in the comments box and I can give you promotional posters.

Essay 9

2009-01-15T18:40:00.000-08:00

IX

In the Place de La Bastille

On the first of May I was sitting outside a café in the Place de
la Bastille in Paris staring at the exultant column, crowned with
a capering figure, which stands in the place where the people
destroyed a prison and ended an age. The thing is a curious
example of how symbolic is the great part of human history.
As a matter of mere material fact, the Bastille when it was taken
was not a horrible prison; it was hardly a prison at all.
But it was a symbol, and the people always go by a sure
instinct for symbols; for the Chinaman, for instance,
at the last General Election, or for President Kruger's hat
in the election before; their poetic sense is perfect.
The Chinaman with his pigtail is not an idle flippancy.
He does typify with a compact precision exactly the thing
the people resent in African policy, the alien and grotesque
nature of the power of wealth, the fact that money has no roots,
that it is not a natural and familiar power, but a sort of airy
and evil magic calling monsters from the ends of the earth.
The people hate the mine owner who can bring a Chinaman
flying across the sea, exactly as the people hated the wizard
who could fetch a flying dragon through the air. It was the same
with Mr. Kruger's hat. His hat (that admirable hat) was not merely
a joke. It did symbolise, and symbolise extremely well, the exact
thing which our people at that moment regarded with impatience and
venom; the old-fashioned, dingy, Republican simplicity, the
unbeautiful dignity of the bourgeois, and the heavier truisms of
political morality. No; the people are sometimes wrong on the
practical side of politics; they are never wrong on the artistic
side.

. . . . .

So it was, certainly, with the Bastille. The destruction of the Bastille
was not a reform; it was something more important than a reform.
It was an iconoclasm; it was the breaking of a stone image.
The people saw the building like a giant looking at them with
a score of eyes, and they struck at it as at a carved fact.
For of all the shapes in which that immense illusion called materialism
can terrify the soul, perhaps the most oppressive are big buildings.
Man feels like a fly, an accident, in the thing he has himself made.
It requires a violent effort of the spirit to remember that
man made this confounding thing and man could unmake it.
Therefore the mere act of the ragged people in the street
taking and destroying a huge public building has a spiritual,
a ritual meaning far beyond its immediate political results.
It is a religious service. If, for instance, the Socialists were
numerous or courageous enough to capture and smash up the Bank
of England, you might argue for ever about the inutility of the act,
and how it really did not touch the root of the economic problem
in the correct manner. But mankind would never forget it.
It would change the world.

Architecture is a very good test of the true strength
of a society, for the most valuable things in a human
state are the irrevocable things--marriage, for instance.
And architecture approaches nearer than any other art to
being irrevocable, because it is so difficult to get rid of.
You can turn a picture with its face to the wall; it would be a
nuisance to turn that Roman cathedral with its face to the wall.
You can tear a poem to pieces; it is only in moments of
very sincere emotion that you tear a town-hall to pieces.
A building is akin to dogma; it is insolent, like a dogma.
Whether or no it is permanent, it claims permanence like a dogma.
People ask why we have no typical architecture of the modern world,
like impressionism in painting. Surely it is obviously
because we have not enough dogmas; we cannot bear to see
anything in the sky that is solid and enduring, anything in
the sky that does not change like the clouds of the sky.
But along with this decision which is involved in creating a building,
there goes a quite similar decision in the more delightful
task of smashing one. The two of necessity go together.
In few places have so many fine public buildings been set up
as here in Paris, and in few places have so many been destroyed.
When people have finally got into the horrible habit of preserving
buildings, they have got out of the habit of building them.
And in London one mingles, as it were, one's tears because so few
are pulled down.

. . . . .

As I sat staring at the column of the Bastille, inscribed to Liberty
and Glory, there came out of one corner of the square (which, like
so many such squares, was at once crowded and quiet) a sudden and
silent line of horsemen. Their dress was of a dull blue, plain and
prosaic enough, but the sun set on fire the brass and steel of their
helmets; and their helmets were carved like the helmets of the Romans.
I had seen them by twos and threes often enough before.
I had seen plenty of them in pictures toiling through the snows
of Friedland or roaring round the squares at Waterloo.
But now they came file after file, like an invasion,
and something in their numbers, or in the evening light that lit
up their faces and their crests, or something in the reverie
into which they broke, made me inclined to spring to my feet
and cry out, "The French soldiers!" There were the little men
with the brown faces that had so often ridden through the capitals
of Europe as coolly as they now rode through their own.
And when I looked across the square I saw that the two other corners
were choked with blue and red; held by little groups of infantry.
The city was garrisoned as against a revolution.

Of course, I had heard all about the strike, chiefly from a baker.
He said he was not going to "Chomer." I said, "Qu'est-ce que
c'est que le chome?" He said, "Ils ne veulent pas travailler."
I said, "Ni moi non plus," and he thought I was a class-conscious
collectivist proletarian. The whole thing was curious, and the true
moral of it one not easy for us, as a nation, to grasp, because our
own faults are so deeply and dangerously in the other direction.
To me, as an Englishman (personally steeped in the English optimism
and the English dislike of severity), the whole thing seemed a fuss
about nothing. It looked like turning out one of the best armies
in Europe against ordinary people walking about the street.
The cavalry charged us once or twice, more or less harmlessly.
But, of course, it is hard to say how far in such criticisms
one is assuming the French populace to be (what it is not)
as docile as the English. But the deeper truth of the matter tingled,
so to speak, through the whole noisy night. This people has
a natural faculty for feeling itself on the eve of something--of the
Bartholomew or the Revolution or the Commune or the Day of Judgment.
It is this sense of crisis that makes France eternally young.
It is perpetually pulling down and building up, as it pulled down
the prison and put up the column in the Place de La Bastille.
France has always been at the point of dissolution. She has found
the only method of immortality. She dies daily.

What we learned:

That this essay is an illustration of "Whoever loses his life will save it." France, because she is always dying in events like the storming of the Bastille, can always be swift, experimental, rebellions, etc. We, by dying to ourselves through more or less moderate mortification, can do the same thing, but without the tyrannical consequences. At the same time, the revolutionary tendencies of France, while they make it ever-young, do not prevent its death from having the bad effects of death. Our deaths to self, by the grace of God, do not have such effects.

You may comment if you like!

Meeting Info

2009-01-12T12:54:00.000-08:00

It appears that we (the UNL Chesterton Society), will be having our first meeting this Thursday at 7 p.m. Find me in front of Starbucks in the main campus Student Union. I should be carrying a copy of "G.K. Chesterton on War and Peace" (you do not need one) but I might forget. Anyone who sees this post is welcome to come and tell their friends and enemies.

On the Use of Chesterton; or, In Praise of Indoctrination

2009-01-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

As the sculptor who, with his tool
Producing raindrop tones on marble bone-phones,
Does mold the stone-jewel to his rule
Ee’n while he, for his home, his stone-craft hones;
Ee’n so ought we, aft’r truth we see
Proven through argument or through common sense,
To place truth indeed eternally
In our whole selves through repetitions in tens.

As a lib’ry full and beautiful
Built of fighting, flaming goods (not brick or wood
They that fall), with knowledge on all walls,
Enchants and fills the mind (it should) with true good;
Ee’n so Chesterton, the par’dox man,
When read to learn and please very frequently
Can put the mind into a plan
Where truth is seen with ease and all that’s good does please.

A Thought at the End of Finals Week

2008-12-19T04:05:00.000-08:00

"Sunrise is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nusiance."
--G.K. Chesterton

I have a solution that some of you might already be following. Don't go to bed in the first place.

Essay by GKC

2008-12-16T17:39:00.000-08:00

VIII

The End of the World

For some time I had been wandering in quiet streets in the curious
town of Besançon, which stands like a sort of peninsula
in a horse-shoe of river. You may learn from the guide books
that it was the birthplace of Victor Hugo, and that it is
a military station with many forts, near the French frontier.
But you will not learn from guide books that the very tiles
on the roofs seem to be of some quainter and more delicate
colour than the tiles of all the other towns of the world;
that the tiles look like the little clouds of some strange sunset,
or like the lustrous scales of some strange fish. They will not
tell you that in this town the eye cannot rest on anything without
finding it in some way attractive and even elvish, a carved face
at a street corner, a gleam of green fields through a stunted arch,
or some unexpected colour for the enamel of a spire or dome.

. . . . .

Evening was coming on and in the light of it all these colours
so simple and yet so subtle seemed more and more to fit together
and make a fairy tale. I sat down for a little outside a café
with a row of little toy trees in front of it, and presently
the driver of a fly (as we should call it) came to the same place.
He was one of those very large and dark Frenchmen, a type not
common but yet typical of France; the Rabelaisian Frenchman,
huge, swarthy, purple-faced, a walking wine-barrel; he was a sort
of Southern Falstaff, if one can imagine Falstaff anything but English.
And, indeed, there was a vital difference, typical of two nations.
For while Falstaff would have been shaking with hilarity like
a huge jelly, full of the broad farce of the London streets,
this Frenchman was rather solemn and dignified than otherwise--
as if pleasure were a kind of pagan religion. After some
talk which was full of the admirable civility and equality
of French civilisation, he suggested without either eagerness
or embarrassment that he should take me in his fly for an hour's
ride in the hills beyond the town. And though it was growing late
I consented; for there was one long white road under an archway
and round a hill that dragged me like a long white cord.
We drove through the strong, squat gateway that was made by Romans,
and I remember the coincidence like a sort of omen that as we
passed out of the city I heard simultaneously the three sounds
which are the trinity of France. They make what some poet calls
"a tangled trinity," and I am not going to disentangle it.
Whatever those three things mean, how or why they co-exist;
whether they can be reconciled or perhaps are reconciled already;
the three sounds I heard then by an accident all at once make up
the French mystery. For the brass band in the Casino gardens behind
me was playing with a sort of passionate levity some ramping tune
from a Parisian comic opera, and while this was going on I heard
also the bugles on the hills above, that told of terrible loyalties
and men always arming in the gate of France; and I heard also,
fainter than these sounds and through them all, the Angelus.

. . . . .

After this coincidence of symbols I had a curious sense of having
left France behind me, or, perhaps, even the civilised world.
And, indeed, there was something in the landscape wild
enough to encourage such a fancy. I have seen perhaps
higher mountains, but I have never seen higher rocks;
I have never seen height so near, so abrupt and sensational,
splinters of rock that stood up like the spires of churches,
cliffs that fell sudden and straight as Satan fell from heaven.
There was also a quality in the ride which was not only astonishing,
but rather bewildering; a quality which many must have noticed
if they have driven or ridden rapidly up mountain roads.
I mean a sense of gigantic gyration, as of the whole
earth turning about one's head. It is quite inadequate
to say that the hills rose and fell like enormous waves.
Rather the hills seemed to turn about me like the enormous sails
of a windmill, a vast wheel of monstrous archangelic wings.
As we drove on and up into the gathering purple of the sunset this
dizziness increased, confounding things above with things below.
Wide walls of wooded rock stood out above my head like a roof.
I stared at them until I fancied that I was staring down at a
wooded plain. Below me steeps of green swept down to the river.
I stared at them until I fancied that they swept up to the sky.
The purple darkened, night drew nearer; it seemed only to cut clearer
the chasms and draw higher the spires of that nightmare landscape.
Above me in the twilight was the huge black hulk of the driver,
and his broad, blank back was as mysterious as the back
of Death in Watts' picture. I felt that I was growing
too fantastic, and I sought to speak of ordinary things.
I called out to the driver in French, "Where are you taking me?"
and it is a literal and solemn fact that he answered me in the same
language without turning around, "To the end of the world."

I did not answer. I let him drag the vehicle up dark,
steep ways, until I saw lights under a low roof of little
trees and two children, one oddly beautiful, playing at ball.
Then we found ourselves filling up the strict main street
of a tiny hamlet, and across the wall of its inn was written
in large letters, LE BOUT DU MONDE--the end of the world.

The driver and I sat down outside that inn without a word, as if all
ceremonies were natural and understood in that ultimate place.
I ordered bread for both of us, and red wine, that was good but
had no name. On the other side of the road was a little plain
church with a cross on top of it and a cock on top of the cross.
This seemed to me a very good end of the world; if the story
of the world ended here it ended well. Then I wondered whether I
myself should really be content to end here, where most certainly
there were the best things of Christendom--a church and children's
games and decent soil and a tavern for men to talk with men.
But as I thought a singular doubt and desire grew slowly in me,
and at last I started up.

"Are you not satisfied?" asked my companion. "No," I said,
"I am not satisfied even at the end of the world."

Then, after a silence, I said, "Because you see there are two
ends of the world. And this is the wrong end of the world;
at least the wrong one for me. This is the French end of the world.
I want the other end of the world. Drive me to the other end
of the world."

"The other end of the world?" he asked. "Where is that?"

"It is in Walham Green," I whispered hoarsely. "You see it
on the London omnibuses. 'World's End and Walham Green.'
Oh, I know how good this is; I love your vineyards and your
free peasantry, but I want the English end of the world.
I love you like a brother, but I want an English cabman,
who will be funny and ask me what his fare 'is.' Your bugles
stir my blood, but I want to see a London policeman.
Take, oh, take me to see a London policeman."

He stood quite dark and still against the end of the sunset,
and I could not tell whether he understood or not. I got back
into his carriage.

"You will understand," I said, "if ever you are an exile even
for pleasure. The child to his mother, the man to his country,
as a countryman of yours once said. But since, perhaps, it is
rather too long a drive to the English end of the world,
we may as well drive back to Besançon."

Only as the stars came out among those immortal hills I wept
for Walham Green.

And here is what Dr. Overkamp and Mr. Overkamp and I found out in our discussion on Monday:

Significant themes:

Patriotism + Love of common things
1. Even in the best place in France, GK wants to go back to England because it is home.
2. The French landscape is portrayed as fantastic and slightly eerie, heightening the sense of familliar national significance that England would have had for him.
3. The familliarity with England is heightened by the things he wants from it: they are all common, even boring things (Dr. Overkamp speculated that Walham Green is a rundown London neighborhood.

Sense of Place
1. Unique description of France: the unusual descriptions of roof tiles and sunset and landscape.

Chesterton has 3600 fans on Facebook

2008-12-10T07:16:00.000-08:00

But I am not one...ask me why not :).

A Task

2008-12-08T07:23:00.000-08:00

If any of you are actually interested in posting or commenting on this blog, here's an idea: find a work of Chesterton that deals with the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary. And/Or tell me what days are best for in-person meetings next semester.

Happy Feast of the Immaculate Conception!

Another Neat Link

2008-12-02T07:27:00.000-08:00

Read this article...it almost makes you want to find a nice person you disagree with and thank them for it.

P.S. Thank you Zach for following all the rules at the bottom of the article above so very well.

2008-12-01T06:34:00.000-08:00

This is a neat post on the blog of the American Chesterton Society:

http://americanchestertonsociety.blogspot.com/2008/12/internationality-of-chesterton.html

Distributsim

2008-11-25T14:58:00.001-08:00

Econ majors (and all others who are interested),
Google "El Diputado Distributa." It is a blog by a liker of G.K. Chesterton's pet economic system, Distributism.

Gype, not yet.

2008-11-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

Gype...not yet
I did a google search for gype, to see if I could find the rules or compile them from all the Original Chestertonian sources. If you type in"gype chesterton -"Dr. Thursday"" you get about 170 answers. Paradoxically, if you type in "gype chesterton -"Dr. Thursday" -aaa" you get about 101 answers.The sites that were excluded when you typed in -aaa were sites that seemed to be lists of all the words there are in alphabetical order. I also learned that practically the only things you find on google are blogs that mention gype but tell you nothing about it, G.K. Chesterton's autobiography, and Maisie Ward's biography of Chesterton. I also found:Lawrence D PO Box 635 Chesterton IN 46304-0635 26421 Andersen Paul Frank ...... Olmsted OH 44070 50920 Gype Lawrence Keith 5980 Whiteford Dr. Highland ... Apparently, someone has actually played this game within the last 10 years and it involved water pistols as a form of punishment for the outside version and scrabble letters for the inside version. It is my personal conclusion that gype is a game for which the rules are to be decided democratically by the players. The idea of the game is absurdity. The game is meant to be adapted to the situation. Apparently, Chesterton's sedentary version was meant to be a visual-spatial strategy game. If you can find, in Chesterton's works, more descriptions of the game then the ones I found, I might try to give you a set of real rules. It is my personal recommendation that we, as the Innocent-Smith style nation of "Users of Diversity," form our own official set of rules so that we may play it over the internet or take it to the next convention.

Our Lady of the Rosary

2008-10-08T07:38:00.001-07:00

Yesterday was the feast of Our Lady of the Rosary....And I didn't realize it until 9 p.m., so I didn't read Chesterton's "Lepanto" or pray the Rosary. Fr. Holdren's sermon was all right, but it probably would have been better if he would have read Lepanto to us instead. After all the feast was instituted to celebrate this most monumentous battle.

Oops, a mistake...

2008-10-06T11:25:00.000-07:00

You actually post a comment by cliking on the words that show the number of comments.

The First Discussion Topic

2008-10-06T11:19:00.000-07:00

This is the current essay that the UNL Chesterton society is discussing. Have fun, and please comment using the "post a comment" Link!

VI

An Accident

(by G.K. Chesterton, of course!)

Some time ago I wrote in these columns an article called"The Extraordinary Cabman." I am now in a position tocontribute my experience of a still more extraordinary cab.The extraordinary thing about the cab was that it did not like me;it threw me out violently in the middle of the Strand.If my friends who read the DAILY NEWS are as romantic (and as rich)as I take them to be, I presume that this experience is not uncommon.I suppose that they are all being thrown out of cabs, all over London.Still, as there are some people, virginal and remote from the world,who have not yet had this luxurious experience, I will givea short account of the psychology of myself when my hansom cabran into the side of a motor omnibus, and I hope hurt it.
I do not need to dwell on the essential romance of the hansom cab--that one really noble modern thing which our age, when it is judged,will gravely put beside the Parthenon. It is really modern in thatit is both secret and swift. My particular hansom cab was modern inthese two respects; it was also very modern in the fact that it cameto grief. But it is also English; it is not to be found abroad; itbelongs to a beautiful, romantic country where nearly everybody ispretending to be richer than they are, and acting as if they were.It is comfortable, and yet it is reckless; and that combinationis the very soul of England. But although I had alwaysrealised all these good qualities in a hansom cab, I had notexperienced all the possibilities, or, as the moderns put it,all the aspects of that vehicle. My enunciation of the meritsof a hansom cab had been always made when it was the right way up.Let me, therefore, explain how I felt when I fell out of a hansomcab for the first and, I am happy to believe, the last time.Polycrates threw one ring into the sea to propitiate the Fates.I have thrown one hansom cab into the sea (if you will excuse a ratherviolent metaphor) and the Fates are, I am quite sure, propitiated.Though I am told they do not like to be told so.
I was driving yesterday afternoon in a hansom cab down oneof the sloping streets into the Strand, reading one of my ownadmirable articles with continual pleasure, and still morecontinual surprise, when the horse fell forward, scrambled a momenton the scraping stones, staggered to his feet again, and went forward.The horses in my cabs often do this, and I have learnt to enjoymy own articles at any angle of the vehicle. So I did not seeanything at all odd about the way the horse went on again.But I saw it suddenly in the faces of all the people on the pavement.They were all turned towards me, and they were all struckwith fear suddenly, as with a white flame out of the sky.And one man half ran out into the road with a movement of theelbow as if warding off a blow, and tried to stop the horse.Then I knew that the reins were lost, and the next moment the horsewas like a living thunder-bolt. I try to describe things exactlyas they seemed to me; many details I may have missed or mis-stated;many details may have, so to speak, gone mad in the race down the road.I remember that I once called one of my experiences narrated in thispaper "A Fragment of Fact." This is, at any rate, a fragment of fact.No fact could possibly be more fragmentary than the sort of factthat I expected to be at the bottom of that street.
. . . . .
I believe in preaching to the converted; for I have generallyfound that the converted do not understand their own religion.Thus I have always urged in this paper that democracy hasa deeper meaning than democrats understand; that is, that commonand popular things, proverbs, and ordinary sayings always havesomething in them unrealised by most who repeat them. Here is one.We have all heard about the man who is in momentary danger,and who sees the whole of his life pass before him in a moment.In the cold, literal, and common sense of words, this is obviouslya thundering lie. Nobody can pretend that in an accidentor a mortal crisis he elaborately remembered all the ticketshe had ever taken to Wimbledon, or all the times that he had everpassed the brown bread and butter.
But in those few moments, while my cab was tearing towardsthe traffic of the Strand, I discovered that there is a truthbehind this phrase, as there is behind all popular phrases.I did really have, in that short and shrieking period,a rapid succession of a number of fundamental points of view.I had, so to speak, about five religions in almost as many seconds.My first religion was pure Paganism, which among sincere menis more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeededa state of mind which is quite real, but for which no propername has ever been found. The ancients called it Stoicism,and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean(if they mean anything) when they talk about Pessimism.It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that happens--as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously enough,came a very strong contrary feeling--that things mattered verymuch indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic.It was a feeling, not that life was unimportant, but thatlife was much too important ever to be anything but life.I hope that this was Christianity. At any rate, it occurredat the moment when we went crash into the omnibus.
It seemed to me that the hansom cab simply turned over on top of me,like an enormous hood or hat. I then found myself crawlingout from underneath it in attitudes so undignified that theymust have added enormously to that great cause to which theAnti-Puritan League and I have recently dedicated ourselves.I mean the cause of the pleasures of the people. As to my demeanourwhen I emerged, I have two confessions to make, and they are bothmade merely in the interests of mental science. The first is thatwhereas I had been in a quite pious frame of mind the moment beforethe collision, when I got to my feet and found I had got off with acut or two I began (like St. Peter) to curse and to swear.A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped.I can distinctly remember consigning the paper to a stateof irremediable spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now,and I apologise both to the man and to the paper. I have not theleast idea what was the meaning of this unnatural anger; I mentionit as a psychological confession. It was immediately followed byextreme hilarity, and I made so many silly jokes to the policemanthat he disgraced himself by continual laughter before all thelittle boys in the street, who had hitherto taken him seriously.
. . . . .
There is one other odd thing about the matter which I also mentionas a curiosity of the human brain or deficiency of brain.At intervals of about every three minutes I kept on remindingthe policeman that I had not paid the cabman, and that I hopedhe would not lose his money. He said it would be all right,and the man would appear. But it was not until about half an hourafterwards that it suddenly struck me with a shock intolerablethat the man might conceivably have lost more than half a crown;that he had been in danger as well as I. I had instinctivelyregarded the cabman as something uplifted above accidents, a god.I immediately made inquiries, and I am happy to say that theyseemed to have been unnecessary.
But henceforward I shall always understand with a darker and more delicatecharity those who take tythe of mint, and anise, and cumin, and neglectthe weightier matters of the law; I shall remember how I was once reallytortured with owing half a crown to a man who might have been dead.Some admirable men in white coats at the Charing Cross Hospital tiedup my small injury, and I went out again into the Strand. I felt uponme even a kind of unnatural youth; I hungered for something untried.So to open a new chapter in my life I got into a hansom cab.

If you want to know more about this Gilbert Keith Chesterton....

2008-10-06T11:18:00.001-07:00

...Click on the American Chesterton Society link and then click on...well, you'll see when you get there.

About Us

2008-10-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

For the past few weeks, the UNL Chesterton society has been meeting in 2105 Neihardt to discuss G.K. Chesterton's essay collection "Tremendous Trifles." For various reasons, this discussion has augumented (and perhaps replaced) by this site. Write articles or post comments on your Chestertonian insights, so that we can all learn to live the almost unbearably good life he loved!