I was thinking about Dr. Thursday's posts on Dover. What's fascinating about the Dover books is that you can play detective. Find out what Chesterton was reading, get into Chesterton's mind a little bit. It's the same as my lower post, wondering about what Dale Ahlquist was reading in 2006. Our human curiosity about other people leads us, especially if they are admirable, to wonder how they come to think the way they do and what forms their ideas.
So these Dover posts by Dr. Thursday feel, to me, like puzzle pieces, like detective work. Chesterton refers to many of the works he's just read in his writing; his clues are everywhere. It take a lot of time to read all of Chesteton's own work, much less the work Chesterton read before he wrote, but that's what makes being a Chestertonian so fun: There's always more to read.
Saturday, January 13, 2007
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Oh, how holy, holy are these mystic symbols we see before us!
ReplyDeleteABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
Great, if indeed not the greatest, of the gifts of Greece and Rome, these powerful characters in their many forms, upper or lower, italic or bold, serifs or no serifs...
Holy? Yes, for with them, when we use them well, we impart our soul to another - when we use them well, we unite ourselves with another, distant in time or space, in vastly contrasting thought...
They give a foretaste of the communion of saints, when we shall see not only God, but each other face-to-face, which is soul-to-soul, and no longer will ASCII or type-fonts or phonemes stand in our way.
How perfect to ponder this today, when we hear about the Wedding in Cana... where the good wine is poured for us in the Inn-at-the-End-of-the-World!!!
Oh holy holy...
Dover Books won the ACS "Outline of Sanity" Award at a previous conference -- if memory serves.
ReplyDelete~ JP
Thanks, JP - yes, I recall that, though I forget the year. And they surely deserve it! Frankly, one of the really great excitements of recent time was when they reprinted GKC's Manalive.
ReplyDeleteEven as I proceed into the research for my next posting, it is amazing to see the number of books they reprint which GKC mentions - books which are not easy to find except in used-book stores. Then there are others I have seen in their catalog which are simply astounding - like Boehm's book on how he developed the modern flute! Though GKC did not mention flutes or Boehm, as far as I can tell, except indirectly, e.g.:
"To murder my next-door neighbour (I will here defer the other problem of eating him afterwards) would be quite a perfect and rounded way of preventing his playing too frequently on the flute or throwing his dead cats over the garden wall."
[ILN Feb 17 1917 CW31:44]
Or
"There is nothing feeble-minded about playing the flute, considered as playing the flute." [GS 102]
Hee hee. Talk about getting into GKC's mind...
Thanks, JP - yes, I recall that, though I forget the year. And they surely deserve it! Frankly, one of the really great excitements of recent time was when they reprinted GKC's Manalive.
ReplyDeleteThe first time I read Manalive was the Dover edition.