The Poetry of Limits

The Poetry of Limits or, Infinity is an eight-letter word

Today, the last day of July, the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola (founder of the Jesuits), we shall conclude our examination of the chapter "The Ethics of Elfland" in GKC's Orthodoxy. It is hard to believe that apparently there is only one mention of Ignatius by GKC in all of AMBER, and doubly fitting that it be about the Pope, which our dear saint would have felt was most appropriate:

It will be found again and again, in ecclesiastical history, that the new departure, the daring innovation, the progressive party, depended directly on the Pope. It was naturally more or less negatively resisted by the bishops, the canons, the clergy in possession under political and patriotic settlements. Official oligarchies of that sort generally do resist reform and experiment, either rightly or wrongly. It is no more peculiar to Catholics than to an Anglican Archdeacon talking about Bolshevism or a Baptist in Tennessee talking about Negro Education. But whenever there appeared, in Catholic history, a new and promising experiment, bolder or broader or more enlightened than existing routine, that movement always came to be identified with the Papacy; because the Papacy alone upheld it against the resisting social medium which it rent asunder. So, in the present case, it was really the Pope who upheld St. Francis and the popular movement of the Friars. So, in the sixteenth century, it was really the Pope who upheld St. Ignatius Loyola and the great educational movement of the Jesuits. The Pope, being the ultimate court of appeal, cannot for shame be a mere expression of any local prejudice; this may easily be strong among local ecclesiastics, without any evil intention; but the remote arbiter at Rome must make some attempt to keep himself clear of it.
[GKC, Chaucer CW18:186]

I am quite happy to have found this quote, as it happens to be demonstrate that GKC well understood the idea of Subsidiarity - more on that another time.

Our own earth or elfland... or is it Eden? I wonder. We have seen some very amazing things, but most of all we recall two major ideas: First, this world is most unusual - so much so it might be called "magic" - in the sense of unexpected, but also in the sense of having been willed by a magician. It is full of surprises. It is certainly not what we would come up with it we had to do it ourselves! Second, that the strange wonders of this world give rise to strange bounds, restrictions and prohibitions - rules which are as strange - and again, as wilful - as any magician or fairy godmother might impose.

These two things seem to be urging GKC towards something: secret blazes on a trail, mysterious footsteps in an attic, curious clues... We might expect GKC's conclusion to be just as bold and surprising, and it is. These last three paragraphs are like a star cluster, or perhaps a nut cluster: chock full of goodies. Let us proceed!

(( click here to go on ))

The first paragraph, again alluding backwards to the bulk of his topics in a kind of review, gives us a very strange and perhaps Ignatian discipline, kind of like the "Count Your Blessings" song from "White Christmas", but also reminding us of George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life":

These subconscious convictions are best hit off by the colour and tone of certain tales. Thus I have said that stories of magic alone can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege. I may express this other feeling of cosmic cosiness by allusion to another book always read in boyhood, "Robinson Crusoe," which I read about this time, and which owes its eternal vivacity to the fact that it celebrates the poetry of limits, nay, even the wild romance of prudence. Crusoe is a man on a small rock with a few comforts just snatched from the sea: the best thing in the book is simply the list of things saved from the wreck. The greatest of poems is an inventory. Every kitchen tool becomes ideal because Crusoe might have dropped it in the sea. It is a good exercise, in empty or ugly hours of the day, to look at anything, the coal-scuttle or the bookcase, and think how happy one could be to have brought it out of the sinking ship on to the solitary island. But it is a better exercise still to remember how all things have had this hair-breadth escape: everything has been saved from a wreck. Every man has had one horrible adventure: as a hidden untimely birth he had not been, as infants that never see the light. Men spoke much in my boyhood of restricted or ruined men of genius: and it was common to say that many a man was a Great Might-Have-Been. To me it is a more solid and startling fact that any man in the street is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been.
[CW1:267]

Yes, George Bailey, you and any man in the street "is a Great Might-Not-Have-Been"...

Have you ever read Robinson Crusoe? I did, quite some time ago; I shall do it again if I have time. There's some comparable bits in The Swiss Family Robinson, or (for something smaller, Danny Dunn on a Desert Island, or (for a old but good sci-fi version) Spacehounds of IPC - and you may know of others like this. Please do not miss this splendid line: "The greatest of poems is an inventory." It is worth considering. But I mentioned an Ignatian exercise: counting your blessings. (We'll see more about the "exercise" shortly.) This is a fun thing to do with children, even if all you do is imagine it. GKC applies it to grand use in the great "Flying Stars" Father Brown story when a pantomime theatre is "got up" with just household items. But do it at work or at school, or in your pew with our Lord... call up in your mind's windows all the gifts you have, and how wonderful it is that they have been saved from the wreck, the fire, the earthquake, the riot... What, you've not suffered these? Why should that stop you? I said it was an exercise. You will understand when you do the next paragraph.

There's more to this "exercise" idea - the idea of making a list of your gifts. It is a major link forward to another part of this book, some 20 pages ahead. It is part of GKC's grand argument, and I shall give you (in advance) the end-point of the link for you to consider:

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up. Thus, if one asked an ordinary intelligent man, on the spur of the moment, "Why do you prefer civilization to savagery?" he would look wildly round at object after object, and would only be able to answer vaguely, "Why, there is that bookcase... and the coals in the coal-scuttle... and pianos... and policemen." The whole case for civilization is that the case for it is complex. It has done so many things. But that very multiplicity of proof which ought to make reply overwhelming makes reply impossible.
[CW1:287]

Finally, before I leave this paragraph, I must tell you of a very curious insight I had this morning at Holy Mass. I grasped something very strange here, in GKC's phrase "the poetry of limits" - and how this is a very important back-link to a previous topic. Recall this line from chapter 2, "The Maniac":

Poetry is sane because it floats easily in an infinite sea; reason seeks to cross the infinite sea, and so make it finite.
[CW1:220]

It made for all kinds of whining and argument. Perhaps because the mathematicians hadn't read this far... Well, here we have the answer, and in a most dramatic way. You see, one of the very common misconceptions by outsiders (and even by some tyros) about "infinity" is how mathematics actually views it as an idea. There are various ways, of course, and some interesting things could be said about them, but this is not ONLY a math blogg (we're Newmanian as well as Chestertonian, of course, and have to cover all subjects - I mean the One subject!) The usual way infinity is taught in calculus is (paradoxically) as a limit. I cannot go into all of this here, but the idea of "limit" is hammered into the young mathematician as something that is NOT "reached" or "taken to"... it just doesn't work that way. It is more of the form of a proof by argument. But even when we represent infinity on a computer, or on paper, or in our heads, we use finite - that is, limited ways of representation: things like the very eight letters "infinity" which represent infinity... or (on x86-based machines) 0x7f800000, or ¥ or À₀ or tan(p/2) or A* or

while(1);

or

lim x^-1
x®0

or even (to resort to an archaism):

10 GOTO 10

which are all ways of representing infinity. Again, we must defer all this to another place, but please bear in mind that GKC has set things right by joining "limit" to poetry. I suggest all math people try to write a poem today - it may be of true assistance in your work. Do a ballade or sonnet, they have the most severe limits!

I would like to say more, but we must proceed to the next paragraph.

But I really felt (the fancy may seem foolish) as if all the order and number of things were the romantic remnant of Crusoe's ship. That there are two sexes and one sun, was like the fact that there were two guns and one axe. It was poignantly urgent that none should be lost; but somehow, it was rather fun that none could be added. The trees and the planets seemed like things saved from the wreck: and when I saw the Matterhorn I was glad that it had not been overlooked in the confusion. I felt economical about the stars as if they were sapphires (they are called so in Milton's Eden): I hoarded the hills. For the universe is a single jewel, and while it is a natural cant to talk of a jewel as peerless and priceless, of this jewel it is literally true. This cosmos is indeed without peer and without price: for there cannot be another one.
[CW1:267-268]

Only an utter fool or one who cares nothing for reason (see chapter II) would ever pretend there is "another universe" or "many universes" or any such thing. Again, one of the true disservices done to our society by "science fiction" in all its forms.. but I didn't lecture about limits, so I won't lecture about cosmology. Though I want to, hee hee. There cannot be more than one universe, by definition... thinking otherwise is indeed a maniac pretension, and a failure to understand limits. The singularity (no pun here) of our universe is utterly stupendous: but then so is its precious and priceless character. Who has more sense: the one who thinks what he has is wonderful, or the one who imagines unending amounts of more and more, none of which he can even get to, much less own? (Ah, you see it is included in the definition that if you can get to it from here, it's the same universe...) Such cosmology, however, is for another time and place.

And so, let us conclude. But where previously we had two ideas, now there is more that those - and one of the Great Chesterton ideas of all his writing. And so we find our new task...

Thus ends, in unavoidable inadequacy, the attempt to utter the unutterable things. These are my ultimate attitudes towards life; the soils for the seeds of doctrine. These in some dark way I thought before I could write, and felt before I could think: that we may proceed more easily afterwards, I will roughly recapitulate them now. I felt in my bones; first, that this world does not explain itself. It may be a miracle with a supernatural explanation; it may be a conjuring trick, with a natural explanation. But the explanation of the conjuring trick, if it is to satisfy me, will have to be better than the natural explanations I have heard. The thing is magic, true or false. Second, I came to feel as if magic must have a meaning, and meaning must have some one to mean it. There was something personal in the world, as in a work of art; whatever it meant it meant violently. Third, I thought this purpose beautiful in its old design, in spite of its defects, such as dragons. Fourth, that the proper form of thanks to it is some form of humility and restraint: we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them. We owed, also, an obedience to whatever made us. And last, and strangest, there had come into my mind a vague and vast impression that in some way all good was a remnant to be stored and held sacred out of some primordial ruin. Man had saved his good as Crusoe saved his goods: he had saved them from a wreck. All this I felt and the age gave me no encouragement to feel it. And all this time I had not even thought of Christian theology.
[CW1:268]

"Thanks is the highest form of thought" as GKC says in A Short History of England, and "gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder". We must not just marvel at the wonders; we must be grateful. It ought to be inscribed in every bar, on every beer mug and wine glass: "we should thank God for beer and Burgundy by not drinking too much of them." Again, we find GKC being a disciple of St. Paul, who wrote "Dedicate yourselves to thankfulness" [Col 3:15 as it appears in the Divine Office] It is no surprise, then, that the word "Eucharist" is given to the Holy Sacrifice, in which God is our thanksgiving.

And yet, as GKC concludes, all this time, through this world of wonder and of gratitude, he had not thought about Christianity... yet it is all linked together, and enriched, and enriching...

Please think about this for now, and perhaps re-read the chapter without my chatter, and see what you think. If you have any questions, please ask. And whatever you do, do it Ad majorem Dei gloriam - to the greater glory of God.

--Dr. Thursday.

Traveling

I'll be heading to the Old and Ancient Traditional Site of the Annual Chesterton Meetings, Minneapolis, tomorrow. This is how we will refer to it in the future, since we won't be there any longer. Next year, in Jeru...sa... I mean, Seattle.

If any of you Minnesotans want to stop by the Uptown Art Fair, come see us on Hennepin (booth 428).

More on the NewYorker, if you can stomach more

Ross Douthat takes Gopnik to task, his readers take Douthat to task, the combox takes everyone to task.

H/T: Dave Z.

Our 1000th Post!

This post, the one you are reading now, has the honor of being our 1000th post! I began this blog at the request of Dale Ahlquist on December 8th (a Feast Day) 2005, and we're still going strong.

In honor of the 1000th post, I give you.......G. K. Chesterton!

Bolshevism will never be answered as it should be so long as people are always talking about the bad Bolshevist. They will only really see through it when they understand the good Bolshevist And he, being truthful and transparent, is really rather easier to see through.

Only I fancy that he, like some other modern things, is seen through so easily that he is not seen at all. He is like a pane of glass - a thing that people forget until they try to put their heads through it; then they get their throats cut, and they are quite surprised.

I mean by this transparency a sort of truism which the idealist accepts and remembers,
while the realist accepts and forgets. One of these truisms is that comradeship is a natural and noble thing; and along with this comradeship there goes a certain case for communism, in the sense of certain things held in common. The young Bolshevist is a great bore when he says this for the thousandth time; but even at the thousandth repetition it is still a truism, and therefore a truth.

And our trouble is that we also treat our own truths too much as truisms. I mean that there are certain obvious things to say about the young Bolshevist, and we say them. We do not always mean them; and we scarcely ever really know what they mean. We very seldom know how true our own words are, and still less how subtle they are.

For what we say carelessly as a simple truth is often a very subtle truth. For instance, one very obvious thing to say about the young Bolshevist is that he is
young. But too often we mean by this nothing better than a sneer at youth for being restless, or a far baser sneer at youth for being idealistic. But the real case against him is not so much that he is restless as that he is only too much at rest in an incomplete cosmos of comradeship. It is not so much that he is idealistic as that he has not yet been disturbed by a newer and more intense ideal.

What is the matter with the young and honest Bolshevist is that he does not yet know anything about private property. He knows all about what he calls Capitalism, a gross disproportion in property which he is right to despise; but he does not know the meaning of private property.

Now when we say this to him, he thinks we mean that he has not settled down into a stuffy and stagnant conservatism, as we have; but I for one mean the very contrary. When I was a young Bolshevist, I thought that older men liked pottering in their private gardens because they were timid or tired out. I liked sharing anything anyhow with my comrades; but I felt like this, not because I was a young Bolshevist, but because I was a young man. What I did not know then, and what I do know now, is that the garden of private property is not a refuge, but rather a new world - as much of a new world as learning to read or to play the piano.
[GKC ILN Feb 25, 1922 CW32:328-9]

Let us proceed into the bold new world of Chesterton together for another 1000 posts! Thanks for being a part of this.

I meant to suggest having cake and ice cream in honor of the 1000th, but at our house, we made a pumpkin cake with cream cheese icing, which was quite delicious; so I give you permission to celebrate in whatever style you would prefer.

Distributism Discussion in St. Louis

A Social Justice Collaborative will take place Thursday-Saturday, Aug. 7-9, at St. Francis de Sales Oratory, 2653 Ohio Ave. in South St. Louis.The event is being sponsored by the Catholic Central Verein (Union) of America in St. Louis in conjunction with the interfaith Center for Economic and Social Justice in Arlington, Va.

Many more details here, and here, and I hope some of you can attend and report back.

The Next Two Chapters of "Joe" are up

You have to scroll down to see them.

Jason Finds Us

Who is this guy on T.V. with the bad wig and moustache, sitting alone on a bench, on a set of what looks to be London in the background, and talking to himself in a bad accent? There seems to be a fog machine involved, as well...I’ve channel surfed into the religious frequencies. But this one is a good kind of corny, and oddly, I’m not feeling the wave of revulsion and disgust I usually get when I’m in this neck of the woods. It’s called the “Apostle of Common Sense” with host Dale Ahlquist.

So, I guess there’s an American G.K. Chesterton Society and this is their show and it’s pretty good...

Weavers of a New Adventure in Books

Did you ever read one of the Hardy Boys mystery stories? Do you remember the name of the town where they lived?

For four years in a row, when I went to the Chesterton Conference, I drove through Bayport - yes, that's the name - on my way to another famous book place. A place far stranger, glorious and wonderful than any fictional invention...

In the town of Stillwater, Minnesota, at the eastern boundary with Wisconsin, just north from the point where 94 crosses the St. Croix River, is a fantastic place called Loome Theological Booksellers. They are located in an old church, now jammed with thousands of books. Some are quite ancient, such as a collection of the letters of St. Bernard printed in 1494. Those of us who have gone to the Chesterton Conferences in the Twin Cities have seen the Loome bookstand in the lobby, with GKC, Belloc, Baring, and others of that vintage...

Why do I tell you this? You may have heard that last year the Loome Antiquarian Bookstore (the "downtown" store which housed the "general collection") closed, and a new, smaller, and more condensed store opened. You may have been wondering whether other changes were imminent. Well, they were, and here's what happened.

This year, on July 1, Dr. Loome sold the store to Andrew Poole and Chris Hagen, two of his employees, who will continue to offer a grand selection of scholarly works. For more details, please see here for the complete report.

I myself have gotten several books from Loome, including a splendid thing called the Greek Lexicon of Liddell and Scott. (Yes, that's THE Liddell: Greek scholar, friend of Charles Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll, and the father of a girl named Alice!) And a few other items too, which have made me very happy, if a bit crammed for space. Hee hee. I wholeheartedly recommend them for a good selection and courteous, friendly and knowledgeable assistance.

You don't need to drive to Stillwater to learn more about Loome and their collection - simply go to http://www.loomebooks.com where you may find things like this:

Book #MCL776
CHESTERTON, G.K. The Thing. Why I Am a Catholic. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1930. First Edition. 8vo, x + 255pp. Good cloth. Minor sunning to spine. Small bump to lower corner. Fore-edge uncut. Interior text clean. Binding sound.
Price: $55.00

Look around - they may have books that you need!

So, if you have any conceivable reason to get near eastern Minnesota, please be sure to get to Stillwater (wave to the Hardys as you drive through Bayport) and check out the Loome bookstores. It is an adventure worthy of the Hardys!

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. Sorry if you had been looking for that St. Bernard book from 1494 (see sample page at right), they already sold it. The price was $9,500, and no, I did NOT buy it - though I wished I could have.

Also, if this idea of a bookstore in a former church sounds utterly crazy, like something a lunatic invented in his stories, please visit the Loome website and you will see that it is real. But at the same time, please pay attention to future postings on our blogg, where you will see how, Chesterton-like, art imitates life. Hee hee.

Joe: Read More

Dr. Thursday has posted more Joe. Only it doesn't look like it because he wants it to look like a book, read from top to bottom, not like a blog which reads from bottom to top. So, scroll down and start reading the story!

A HUGE bunch of Clerihews

Billy Mills, a book blogger for the UK Guardian is looking for clerihews. Go join the fun.

Good News and Keep it up

Regarding our latest :

We’ve had a great response to our appeal. We’ve raised about $15,000. A couple of nice-sized donations and many wonderful donations. Thanks to everyone. -Dale

In related news, the American Chesterton Society does not accept Paypal donations (this is in response to several requests from people who have money just hovering in their Paypal accounts and would love to hand over those sums to our organization, for which I can only say, Thanks for even considering that as an option!) because they want too much of a cut. We use Just Add Commerce, which demands much less, and therefore, as a non-profit struggling for every dime, seems like a good choice.

Thanks to all who donated, and please donate if you haven't yet.

What Would Chesterton Say about Oil Dependence?

We just watched a very eye opening DVD called A Crude Awakening, which, as we are near term in the market for a new vehicle of some sort, was alarming.

And now you know why the Nissan Prius is on my mind.

Chesterton never drove himself, but what do you think he would think about transportation today? What is the common sense thing to do?

I think he'd be the one challenging our world to develop a new manner of transport which did NOT involve oil. One that could possibly use the same infrastructure (roads, bridges, highways, railways) but without relying on oil.

What do you think?

Our Cosy Little Universe

(A preliminary note of warning: there will be more animal humour today, not quite as severe as other times, but then I do not know your tolerance for it. Mine is quite low, and there is a goodly amount, and other things besides. Finish your drinks and snacks...)

Well, I hope you have spent the last week going around chanting "do it again" to yourself, and maybe playing your Beach Boys albums, too? I mean, the beach is the place to go. Hee hee. Since then, I found a wonderful Latin quote which surely links into our discussion about amplifiers that go up to eleven:

Decies repetita placebit
(ten times repeated please)
[Horace, Art of Poetry, 365]

That is, a good work of art can seen again and again, and still will be fresh and wonderful. (Horace meant a poem, but it pertains to sculpture, painting, music, movies as well!)

Of course, if I had known of this last week, I might have said duodecies... hee hee. But then Spinal Tap were - er - musicians, who usually have a thing about 12, or should. No, I don't mean the Apostles that time! But in computing we go up to 16, or 32, or 64, or other powers of two. And since we use "hex" (base 16, not a magic spell, hee hee!) our amps still only go up to 10₁₆. Ahem.

One of the things that comes up in this very complex discussion of the nature of "law" in the sciences, and one of the things people like to flaunt in such discussions of science versus religion, is the idea of a "miracle". I am not going to give a whole long argument here, nor does GKC - but he does bring up the issue, and I wish to call it to your attention. If you wish to know more, there are several books by Father Jaki which I recommend, such as the very interesting God and the Sun at Fatima (about the miracle of the sun dancing), or the discussion of the Ninth Bridgewater Treatise by Charles Babbage in Jaki's Brain, Mind, and Computers. Babbage, if you do not yet know, was the First Computer Scientist (he lived from 1792-1871), and wrote about God as well as programming - in fact, he suggested that God really is a programmer... but I must reserve that to my own blogg for additional discussion. (Yes, I have re-established my blogg, so perhaps I will examine BMC there. But for now, let us proceed.

(( click here to read more. ))

Remember, Chesterton has just finished telling us about his principle of "Do it again": the idea that God claps His hands and commands an encore of the sun and moon, of trees and dogs and humans - but this was in demonstration of his pair of convictions he derived from Fairy Tales: "first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness."

This was my first conviction; made by the shock of my childish emotions meeting the modern creed in mid-career. I had always vaguely felt facts to be miracles in the sense that they are wonderful: now I began to think them miracles in the stricter sense that they were wilful. I mean that they were, or might be, repeated exercises of some will. In short, I had always believed that the world involved magic: now I thought that perhaps it involved a magician. And this pointed a profound emotion always present and sub-conscious; that this world of ours has some purpose; and if there is a purpose, there is a person. I had always felt life first as a story: and if there is a story there is a story-teller.
[CW1:264]

Here we have another deep idea - I mean a high point in our journey, from which a grand and wonderful Road leads off to the very heart of elfland! This insight, the sense that creation has a creator, but now exalted to the idea of story and storyteller: this is given a great exposition in GKC's The Everlasting Man (see CW2:380) and in J. R. R. Tolkien's essay "On Fairy-Tales"... alas we have no time to proceed down it and examine the splendid sights and come to a wonderful place in the end, where the best Story comes true...

But modern thought also hit my second human tradition. It went against the fairy feeling about strict limits and conditions. The one thing it loved to talk about was expansion and largeness. Herbert Spencer would have been greatly annoyed if any one had called him an imperialist, and therefore it is highly regrettable that nobody did. But he was an imperialist of the lowest type. He popularized this contemptible notion that the size of the solar system ought to over-awe the spiritual dogma of man. Why should a man surrender his dignity to the solar system any more than to a whale? If mere size proves that man is not the image of God, then a whale may be the image of God; a somewhat formless image; what one might call an impressionist portrait. It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree. But Herbert Spencer, in his headlong imperialism, would insist that we had in some way been conquered and annexed by the astronomical universe. He spoke about men and their ideals exactly as the most insolent Unionist talks about the Irish and their ideals. He turned mankind into a small nationality. And his evil influence can be seen even in the most spirited and honourable of later scientific authors; notably in the early romances of Mr. H. G. Wells. Many moralists have in an exaggerated way represented the earth as wicked. But Mr. Wells and his school made the heavens wicked. We should lift up our eyes to the stars from whence would come our ruin.[contrast this with Psalm 121:1]
[CW1:264-5]

Some notes:

• An imperialist is someone who supports the idea of a large British Empire. At the time GKC was writing, it was much bigger, and there were some who wanted it bigger. As you may have noticed, GKC preferred small things, but we must be very careful not to misinterpret this preference; we shall hear from GKC himself about that very shortly.
• Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) an English philosopher, whose philosophy was "at once dingy and dapper" [ILN March 14 1914 CW30:59]; "in some ways the most mediaeval of modern men." [ILN July 14, 1906 CW27:237] A Darwinian who hung out with others of that type, like Huxley and John Stuart Mill; he is not treated in GKC's Heretics by name, but appears over 100 times in AMBER, but the best single hint about him is most likely this: "the youth of Herbert Spencer was emphatically a misspent youth. It was spent over the scientific names of things instead of over the things themselves - Herbert Spencer never saw a thing in his life; if he had seen a thing he would have fled screaming." [ILN Sept 1 1906 CW27:274]
• An impressionist portrait: "a type of Realism the aim of which is to render the iummediate sense imporession of the artist apart from any element of inference or study of detail" (such as done by Monet, Degas, Pissarro, Renoir).
• A Unionist (according to one reference) is a member of the political party that advanced maintenance of the parliamentary union between Great Britain and Ireland, in opposition to Irish home rule.
• H. G. Wells wrote early science fiction classics such as The Time Machine, The War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man (to be distinguished from the Father Brown short story of the same name!)
  

I see one line that I feel deserves to be re-read: "It is quite futile to argue that man is small compared to the cosmos; for man was always small compared to the nearest tree." A whole mound of blogging might be done on it, and it is worth contemplating how far into the Large (the galaxies and their groupings) as well as the Small (the atomic and subatomic particles) we have been able to "see"... even in our observatories and our particle-accelerators we can walk out and stand under a tree and understand. But we are going to see something quite a bit more marvellous shortly.

But the expansion of which I speak was much more evil than all this. I have remarked that the materialist, like the madman, is in prison; in the prison of one thought. These people seemed to think it singularly inspiring to keep on saying that the prison was very large. The size of this scientific universe gave one no novelty, no relief. The cosmos went on for ever, but not in its wildest constellation could there be anything really interesting; anything, for instance, such as forgiveness or free will. The grandeur or infinity of the secret of its cosmos added nothing to it. It was like telling a prisoner in Reading gaol that he would be glad to hear that the gaol now covered half the county. The warder would have nothing to show the man except more and more long corridors of stone lit by ghastly lights and empty of all that is human. So these expanders of the universe had nothing to show us except more and more infinite corridors of space lit by ghastly suns and empty of all that is divine.

In fairyland there had been a real law; a law that could be broken, for the definition of a law is something that can be broken. But the machinery of this cosmic prison was something that could not be broken; for we ourselves were only a part of its machinery. We were either unable to do things or we were destined to do them. The idea of the mystical condition quite disappeared; one can neither have the firmness of keeping laws nor the fun of breaking them. The largeness of this universe had nothing of that freshness and airy outbreak which we have praised in the universe of the poet. This modern universe is literally an empire; that is, it was vast, but it is not free. One went into larger and larger windowless rooms, rooms big with Babylonian perspective; but one never found the smallest window or a whisper of outer air.
[CW1:265-6]

I think we had some discussion on this horror of infinitely recursive nested buildings last year, when we talked about fractals (did we really talk about fractals here? Wow.) This is quite a horrifying image of hell, and though it may take some pondering, is quite preceisely accurate in a theological sense: an infinity which has no End. Heaven, of course is the infinity which has an End, Who is God. This is the true and glorious intersection where my own computing meets theology, as Chesterton has revealed! The end which has no end, or the endless End... it's our choice (we had that word too last week, didn't we!) But let us go on, as we are coming to the point...

Their infernal parallels seemed to expand with distance; but for me all good things come to a point, swords for instance. So finding the boast of the big cosmos so unsatisfactory to my emotions I began to argue about it a little; and I soon found that the whole attitude was even shallower than could have been expected. According to these people the cosmos was one thing since it had one unbroken rule. Only (they would say) while it is one thing it is also the only thing there is. Why, then, should one worry particularly to call it large? There is nothing to compare it with. It would be just as sensible to call it small. A man may say, "I like this vast cosmos, with its throng of stars and its crowd of varied creatures." But if it comes to that why should not a man say, "I like this cosy little cosmos, with its decent number of stars and as neat a provision of live stock as I wish to see"? One is as good as the other; they are both mere sentiments. It is mere sentiment to rejoice that the sun is larger than the earth; it is quite as sane a sentiment to rejoice that the sun is no larger than it is. A man chooses to have an emotion about the largeness of the world: why should he not choose to have an emotion about its smallness?

It happened that I had that emotion. When one is fond of anything one addresses it by diminutives, even if it is an elephant or a life-guardsman. The reason is, that anything, however huge, that can be conceived of as complete, can be conceived of as small. If military moustaches did not suggest a sword or tusks a tail, then the object would be vast because it would be immeasurable. But the moment you can imagine a guardsman you can imagine a small guardsman. The moment you really see an elephant you can call it "Tiny." If you can make a statue of a thing you can make a statuette of it. These people professed that the universe was one coherent thing; but they were not fond of the universe. But I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind. Actually and in truth I did feel that these dim dogmas of vitality were better expressed by calling the world small than by calling it large. For about infinity there was a sort of carelessness which was the reverse of the fierce and pious care which I felt touching the pricelessness and the peril of life. They showed only a dreary waste; but I felt a sort of sacred thrift. For economy is far more romantic than extravagance. To them stars were an unending income of halfpence; but I felt about the golden sun and the silver moon as a schoolboy feels if he has one sovereign and one shilling.
[CW1:266-7]

Though GKC just mentions money (a sovereign is a British gold coin worth one pound sterling, and a shilling is a British silver coin worth 1/20 of a pound) consider this priceless line:

"I was frightfully fond of the universe and wanted to address it by a diminutive. I often did so; and it never seemed to mind."

Remember the famous essay "What I Found In My Pocket" from Tremendous Trifles? "For the knife is only a short sword; and the pocket-knife is a secret sword." It has a point... something very small, but very penetrating.

--Dr. Thursday

Dr. Thursday's New Novel on a Blog!

Dr. Thursday hinted about his new book, and now he's decided to begin publishing it on a blog. This is a great story, so I suggest bookmarking it so you can read it as it gets blogged.

I hope you will enjoy reading this extraordinary story about an ordinary guy named Joe as much as I did.

Please go visit the new blog and leave a comment.

Maureen Wittmann's Blog

Please stop by Maureen Wittmann's blog. Maureen is a fellow homeschooling mom, she has seven kids, the oldest of whom starts college this fall. And incidentally, a hopeful in the Gilbert and Frances essay scholarship contest.

Chesterton Society Needs YOUR Help

Dear Friends of Chesterton,

I don’t mean to clog up the blog, but I need to make another appearance here directly on the heels of dealing with the New Yorker. With Chesterton becoming better known, the attacks are beginning, and we need to be able to respond.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t be in a worse position to do so. The American Chesterton Society is facing a financial crisis. We need your help. Our usual donations are way down, and as usual, our expenses have gone in the other direction. We need to raise $30,000.

We understand that everyone is feeling squeezed right now, but whatever you can do to help - $25, $50, $100 or more – it would be greatly appreciated.

Your donation is tax-deductible, and you can donate online.

or mail you donation to:

The American Chesterton Society
4117 Pebblebrook Circle
Minneapolis, MN 55437

Please help us keep Chesterton’s flame burning brightly. Thank you so very much.


Your servant,

Dale Ahlquist, President
American Chesterton Society

More about Chesterton's beliefs from Dale Ahlquist

After someone commented that the official statement from the Weiner Library was not strong enough proof that Chesterton wasn't anti-Semitic, Dale responded:

I certainly agree it could have been better written, but if you read it again, it is clear enough. They don’t think he is anti-Semitic, but they admit he has a reputation of being anti-Semitic. This is pretty much 180 degrees opposite of what Gopnik says, who claims that “Jew-hating” is part of Chesterton’s very fabric. As much as we’d like the statement to be better, the point is that it comes from what can be considered the most “authorized” mouthpiece on anti-Semitism. And there are plenty more testimonials on Chesterton’s behalf – the greatest being his own life and words in which he abhors racial theories and defends the dignity of all human beings.

The controversy largely exists because Chesterton had the gall to also hold people accountable for their actions, and he did not give any exemptions to the Jews. Chesterton criticized everybody, but not for who they were but for things they said and did. No one got a free pass, and his criticisms of the Americans and the Germans and especially the English go much farther than anything he said about the Jews. Joseph Pearce sums it up in his biography of GKC, that Chesterton defended the Jews when they were oppressed, but criticized them when they were the oppressor (which is basically how he dealt with anybody).

Obviously, there are people – both Jews and non-Jews – who cannot abide the characterization that Jews were ever the oppressor and who regard any criticism of the Jews as anti-Semitism. The accusation in such cases is meaningless.

We’re going to have to devote an issue of Gilbert Magazine to this topic, and we will refute the charge on all accounts.

I wanted you to know this, and to know we'll do a future issue of Gilbert on this topic.

Dale Ahlquist's Response to the New Yorker

Dale has commanded that I publish his letter in its entirety for you now. And when Dale sends an email, people respond.

So, here it is. In addition, thanks to Dave Z., I've included two quotes from prominent Jews who knew Chesterton.

To the Editor of the New Yorker:

Mr. Gopnik has besmirched the good name of the good Gilbert Keith Chesterton, even while sandwiching his comments between thick slices of praise. Maybe it’s just revenge. After all, Chesterton said, “New York reminded me of hell. Pleasantly, of course.”

For those of us who love Chesterton, we are always distressed to see him subjected to any vile charge. But we’ve gotten a little tired of the charge of anti-Semitism. He’s been absolved of that one too many times for us to count – from the tribute by Rabbi Stephen Wise to the official statements of the Weiner Library (the archives of anti-Semitism and holocaust history in London). Mr. Gopnik has added a new technique to making the charge stick – declaring that Chesterton’s admirers should not defend Chesterton against the horrible accusation. Hm. That is certainly one way to end the debate. I would meekly suggest that a better way would be for people to stop repeating charges that have already been dropped.

But we are still going to take Mr. Gopnik’s article as a sign of hope. Fifteen or twenty years ago, Chesterton was simply dismissed by the literary establishment as an anti-Semite and not taken seriously. Now he is at least being taken seriously before being dismissed as an anti-Semite. As the Chesterton revival kicks into high gear, we expect the trend to continue to the point where Chesterton is simply taken seriously without the obligation to mention anything about how Chesterton judges the Jews or how the Jews judge Chesterton.

In the meantime, we regret the unfortunate turn in Mr. Gopnik’s otherwise brilliant essay. There is something a little too desperate, too anxious in his attempt to prove that Chesterton is anti-Semitic. He is dancing as fast as he can to explain away Chesterton’s Zionism and his outspoken stance against Hitler for oppressing the Jews. (“I will die defending the last Jew in Europe.” What does it take to convince some people?)

Among the worn out arguments Mr. Gopnik uses is: Chesterton should not treat the Jews as if they are different because…well…they’re different. But far more troubling is his argument that Chesterton, the Catholic convert, has this pervasive nastiness woven into the very fabric of his philosophy. Whether consciously or not, Mr. Gopnik has broadened his implication to include the whole Catholic Church. Perhaps some future literary critic will be discussing Mr. Gopnik’s anti-Catholicism rather than Chesterton’s anti-Semitism. He can only hope that he will one day be considered so noteworthy a controversialist.

For now, however, the most important consideration should be of the following passage from Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man:

“…the world owes God to the Jews… [T]hrough all their wanderings… they did indeed carry the fate of the world in that wooden tabernacle…The more we really understand of the ancient conditions that contributed to the final culture of the Faith, the more we shall have a real and even a realistic reverence for the greatness of the Prophets of Israel. [W]hile the whole world melted into this mass of confused mythology, this Deity who is called tribal and narrow, precisely because he was what is called tribal and narrow, preserved the primary religion of all mankind. He was tribal enough to be universal. He was as narrow as the universe…”

Doesn’t exactly sound like the writings of an anti-Semite. Sounds more like someone who has a deep respect for the Jews. Also sounds like a pretty good argument for localism. Chesterton has thrown Mr. Gopnik’s main point into serious jeopardy. Either Chesterton is right to defend localism, which is what preserved the Jews, or localism is a menace and the Jews should have melted into their surroundings three thousand years ago. Mr. Gopnik cannot have it both ways.

Your servant,

Dale Ahlquist
President, American Chesterton Society

The year after Chesterton's death, the great American Rabbi, Stephen Wise, wrote:

Indeed I was a warm admirer of Gilbert Chesterton. Apart from his delightful art and his genius in many directions, he was, as you know, a great religionist. He as a Catholic, I as a Jew, could not have seen eye to eye with each other, and he might have added "particularly seeing that you are cross-eyed": but I deeply respected him. When Hitlerism came, he was one of the first to speak out with all the directness and frankness of a great and unabashed spirit. Blessing to his memory! (Ward 265)

The Statement from the Weiner Library:

The difference between social and philosophical anti-Semitism is something which is not fully understood. John Buchan, for example, was charming towards Jewish people he met, but undoubtedly possessed a world view of anti-Semitism. With Chesterton we’ve never thought of a man who was seriously anti-Semitic on either count. He was a man who played along, and for that he must pay a price; he has, and has the public reputation of anti-Semitism. He was not an enemy, and when the real testing time came along he showed what side he was on. (Coren, 214-15)

Dr. Thursday's Post

The Amps of "Spinal Tap" May Go Up to Eleven, but Ours Go Up to Twelve

I have just completed a book which combines humor, books, work, a shipwreck, magic, crime, music, cloistered Carmelites, cable TV, Latin, computers, secret passages, food, boredom, beer, Mass, death, and a few other things of interest to Chestertonians. Joe, its main character, likes rock-and-roll, and hopes one day to buy an electric guitar. Yes, like Joe, I also like rock and roll - at least some songs, and some bands. (My instrument, however is the bass.)

Certain people may find this musical taste just as sinful as liking stories about magic, or about murder (some of which I also like.) Obviously, there are times and places for all things, including loud music, whether it be the 1812 Overture or - uh - you choose the band. But whenever the topic of loud music comes up, Chestertonians should recall these famous words:

I remember a debate in which I had praised militant music in ritual, and some one asked me if I could imagine Christ walking down the street before a brass band. I said I could imagine it with the greatest ease; for Christ definitely approved a natural noisiness at a great moment. When the street children shouted too loud, certain priggish disciples did begin to rebuke them in the name of good taste. He said: "If these were silent the very stones would cry out." [Luke 19:40] With these words He called up all the wealth of artistic creation that has been founded on this creed.
["The Tower" in Tremendous Trifles]

OK, He didn't say the very rocks would cry out, but still... (hm, feels like a St. Peter joke in there somewhere...) No, I am not going to get into the various issues of rock today. I mean rock music. Yes, there are lyrics of some songs which come right out of hell. But on the contrary (hee hee) there are others, even from hard rock songs, which might pass for something from Aquinas.

So. If Pope Benedict XVI can quote Nietzsche in his first encyclical [Deus Caritas Est 3, note 1], and Aquinas can quote the gods-and-goddesses-worshipping, slave-approving, milky-way-from-swamp-dreaming Aristotle [e.g. Summa I Q5A2 and many other places], and St. Paul can quote pagan poets [Acts 17:28] we too can quote rock lyrics when they assist us in understanding Chesterton, which is to say in understanding reality: God, the Universe, ourselves.

The paradox we shall encounter today, however, is the reverse: when rock musicians quote Chesterton.

The hero of the story I mentioned earlier grew up in a small town on the Atlantic shore, and though he works in cable TV, he still thinks of himself as a "beach boy" - which is also the name of a famous surfer rock band from California. Today we shall learn that they happen to have written a song which quotes GKC's Orthodoxy - one of the greatest and most powerful and mystical quotes of the entire book, and one which happens to unite God, the Universe and ourselves...

Click here to find out more.
We are, as you may recall, fairly far into the chapter of Orthodoxy called "The Ethics of Elfland" and we have seen some very strange things. We have learned that we are living in a marvellous, magical world. (If that second "M" word bothers you, let us say "unexpected") and the marvel gives rise to two important things: a sense of gratitude, and the very important thing GKC calls "the Doctrine of Conditional Joy": the idea that we are given this marvel on certain strange conditions. Now, as we are starting to come toward the conclusion of the chapter, GKC provides a kind of review, stunning in its implied recommendation:

Well, I left the fairy tales lying on the floor of the nursery, and I have not found any books so sensible since. I left the nurse guardian of tradition and democracy, and I have not found any modern type so sanely radical or so sanely conservative. But the matter for important comment was here: that when I first went out into the mental atmosphere of the modern world, I found that the modern world was positively opposed on two points to my nurse and to the nursery tales. It has taken me a long time to find out that the modern world is wrong and my nurse was right. The really curious thing was this: that modern thought contradicted this basic creed of my boyhood on its two most essential doctrines. I have explained that the fairy tales founded in me two convictions; first, that this world is a wild and startling place, which might have been quite different, but which is quite delightful; second, that before this wildness and delight one may well be modest and submit to the queerest limitations of so queer a kindness. But I found the whole modern world running like a high tide against both my tendernesses; and the shock of that collision created two sudden and spontaneous sentiments, which I have had ever since and which, crude as they were, have since hardened into convictions.

First, I found the whole modern world talking scientific fatalism; saying that everything is as it must always have been, being unfolded without fault from the beginning. The leaf on the tree is green because it could never have been anything else. Now, the fairy-tale philosopher is glad that the leaf is green precisely because it might have been scarlet. He feels as if it had turned green an instant before he looked at it. He is pleased that snow is white on the strictly reasonable ground that it might have been black. Every colour has in it a bold quality as of choice; the red of garden roses is not only decisive but dramatic, like suddenly spilt blood. He feels that something has been done. But the great determinists of the nineteenth century were strongly against this native feeling that something had happened an instant before. In fact, according to them, nothing ever really had happened since the beginning of the world. Nothing ever had happened since existence had happened; and even about the date of that they were not very sure.
[CW1:261-2]

Ah... it is like something DONE. I had a resonance in my mind as I read this, and it took some work to find out what, as I do not know French. Some time ago, a friend (who does know French) was speaking about a matter of philosophy, and used the term donné meaning something given (that is, a starting point of discussion, or a matter not presently under debate, something taken for granted). But this is quite apt: the green grass is a donné, something given - it is something DONE. It was chosen to be that way, and so it is. We cannot debate it, even if we might be color blind or have our eyes closed, or be out at night... it is that way and no other. Green grass is so poetic (which means something MADE; see GKC's Chaucer CW18:155.) But we are not being poets here; we are simply observing. Someone else already was a poet, when He made the grass, or we could not even be its critics. (Some joke ought to read: if a critic doesn't read any books, or watch any movies, what does he write about? This strongly hints at the contingent ontology of evil, but we cannot go into that now.)

Here, my own discipline compels me to mention, we find the great and glorious mark of Doctor Chesterton, the true scientist: he approaches Reality in humility. He does not "expect" the leaf to be green, for it might have been something else. He takes the leaf as something "done" - which reveals his true understanding of experiment, which comes from the same root as "experience", and for a very good reason: an experiment is performed so that we might experience what occurs. We seem to think "experiment" means "test". It doesn't. It means "live through it, experience it, witness it". Which is why some branches of science, like astronomy, weather, archaeology and geology, have such a hard time with experiments: you cannot RE-experience what has already happened. All you can do is look at what's left over. Ahem. But that's going too deep into that very interesting side trail called "epistemology of the sciences" and we cannot go there either; we're not equipped for such strenuous work. (Whew.)

But, as GKC emphasizes, and I repeated, these things - like green leaves and so on - have this feeling of something that has been done. Someone good waved a wand, made a choice, and made it to be SO. Sure, it might have been done differently! That's the nature of a choice. Here's the moment for that delicious quote from the song "Free Will" by Rush: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." But God did decide. He chose the green leaf and it was so. He saw it, and it was good. [See Genesis chapter 1.]

Are you feeling a strong wind, buffeting us here on the trail? Yes, we are rather shocked to discover that we happen to stand on a very high point indeed, and some of you may be horrified. We are seeing that somehow we are getting at the supreme matter of the Divine Will here. Yes, oh, my, yes. But isn't that what we are supposed to do: "Jesus saith to them: My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, that I may perfect his work." [Jn 4:34 emphasis added; cf Mt 12:50; see also Mt 26:39]

Divine will? How can this be science? I mean Physics and stuff like that! Are we not confusing the disciplines? Shall we not be criticised by the great student-of-study, Cardinal Newman:

If they certainly would resist the divine who determined the orbit of Jupiter by the Pentateuch, why am I to be accused of cowardice or illiberality, because I will not tolerate their attempt in turn to theologize by means of astronomy? And if experimentalists would be sure to cry out, did I attempt to install the Thomist philosophy in the schools of astronomy and medicine, why may not I, when Divine Science is ostracized, and La Place, or Buffon, or Humboldt, sits down in its chair, why may not I fairly protest against their exclusiveness, and demand the emancipation of Theology?
[Newman, The Idea of a University IV, 14]

No, we are not doing that. We are in elfland, and we are observing its wonders, in awe of the wizard Who put them here. Haven't you heard that song, which seems to be quoted sometimes at Mass:

If ever, o ever, a wiz there was, the Wizard of Oz is one because...
Because of the wonderful things he does.

Confer:

All Your actions show Your wisdom and love. [Eucharistic Prayer IV]

Yes. Well? Don't you wonder how it happens? GKC tells us. It's not what you expect. And the funny thing is, these next two paragraphs give us the true foundation - no, even better, the license - to practice "science" (meaning physics, chemistry, and so on) - even while they speak so gloriously about will, and about God and His free choices of His creation.

A warning before you proceed. In previous postings I warned you to finish your drink or snack, before making you laugh. And there is a bit of animal humour coming, so you ought to finish it anyway. But this time, my warning is more profound. You may possibly feel the urge to genuflect. This is one of the Great Heights of this book, and perhaps one of the most important insights of the last century. If you read it with humility, you will be moved. Then please read it again, and take it to your lab, or your workplace, or your classroom, or your home, and act upon it. It may seem too technical at first, or even third reading, but it will surely seep in, once you do it again...

The modern world as I found it was solid for modern Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are. But when I came to ask them I found they had really no proof of this unavoidable repetition in things except the fact that the things were repeated. Now, the mere repetition made the things to me rather more weird than more rational. It was as if, having seen a curiously shaped nose in the street and dismissed it as an accident, I had then seen six other noses of the same astonishing shape. I should have fancied for a moment that it must be some local secret society. So one elephant having a trunk was odd; but all elephants having trunks looked like a plot. I speak here only of an emotion, and of an emotion at once stubborn and subtle. But the repetition in Nature seemed sometimes to be an excited repetition, like that of an angry schoolmaster saying the same thing over and over again. The grass seemed signalling to me with all its fingers at once; the crowded stars seemed bent upon being understood. The sun would make me see him if he rose a thousand times. The recurrences of the universe rose to the maddening rhythm of an incantation, and I began to see an idea.

All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately upon one assumption; a false assumption. It is supposed that if a thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive it would dance. This is a fallacy even in relation to known fact. For the variation in human affairs is generally brought into them, not by life, but by death; by the dying down or breaking off of their strength or desire. A man varies his movements because of some slight element of failure or fatigue. He gets into an omnibus because he is tired of walking; or he walks because he is tired of sitting still. But if his life and joy were so gigantic that he never tired of going to Islington, he might go to Islington as regularly as the Thames goes to Sheerness. The very speed and ecstacy of his life would have the stillness of death. The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore. Heaven may encore the bird who laid an egg. If the human being conceives and brings forth a human child instead of bringing forth a fish, or a bat, or a griffin, the reason may not be that we are fixed in an animal fate without life or purpose. It may be that our little tragedy has touched the gods, that they admire it from their starry galleries, and that at the end of every human drama man is called again and again before the curtain. Repetition may go on for millions of years, by mere choice, and at any instant it may stop. Man may stand on the earth generation after generation, and yet each birth be his positively last appearance.
[CW1:261-264]

Before we proceed, a few notes to assist:

* Islington: a borough of London. GKC uses it in a number of places as a general-purpose town. (See below for a sample.)
* Thames/Sheerness: The Thames is the river of London. Sheerness is a town on the mouth of the Thames. (American translation: "as regularly as the Mississippi goes to New Orleans".)
* encore: a French interjection, meaning "again!" or "once more!"
* "signalling with all its fingers": yes, you get five points if you recalled the Professor de Worms' code from The Man Who Was Thursday.
* "if the sun were alive it would dance": this was some nine years before Fatima where the sun danced. See Jaki's God and the Sun at Fatima for a very interesting study of that event.
* "incantation": You wonder why this is elfland? But do not forget the root of "incantation" is the Latin word for "song". No wonder Sam Gamgee, in awe of the singing of the Elves of Rivendell (or was it Lorien?), talked about being "inside a song"; that's almost a literal translation of the word.

Now... (Ahem!) Speaking of songs...

Yes, "Do It Again" is the title of a song by the Beach Boys. And yes, "Do It Again" is also the Official Cheer of all sports teams at Chesterton University. (It was selected by one of our Favorite Chestertonians at a Conference some years ago.) Actually there's just the one, the Gype team. They're undefeated since no other school has one. If you don't know about Gype, you need to read GKC's Autobiography (see CW16:211-2).

An aside: It might be argued, by the critics who have nothing better to do, and certainly nothing creative to make, that this argument of lively repetition is rebutted by GKC himself in the story called "A Somewhat Improbable Story" in CW14:91 et seq about how Bumpton Street goes to heaven for justice against a dull man. But that is an error caused by a failure to read the story carefully. The story is actually the usual instance of an idea of GKC's non-fiction appearing in GKC's fiction. Another, simpler counter-example to these critics is provided by the threefold repetition (which is, of course, not a repetition at all) of what we might call "Magic By Iteration". Here is one:

There is a truth in talking of the variety of Nature; but I think that Nature often shows her chief strangeness in her sameness. There is a weird rhythm in this very repetition; it is as if the earth were resolved to repeat a single shape until the shape shall turn terrible. Have you ever tried the experiment of saying some plain word, such as "dog," thirty times? By the thirtieth time it has become a word like "snark" or "pobble." It does not become tame, it becomes wild, by repetition.
[GKC, "The Telegraph Poles" in Alarms and Discursions]

Another aside: Father Jaki has done important work on Islam and its view of the Divine Will, noting its historical underpinnings and showing how its theology makes modern science impossible, because of its emphasis on the freedom of the divine will. [See e.g. chapter 9 in Science and Creation or his booklet called Jesus, Islam, Science] As GKC shows in his Heretics a heresy is an exaggeration of a truth, to the neglect of even related truths. Here, this single paragraph of GKC spells the fullness of defeat for such a heretical view of God, for if God's will is free, He is also free to repeat Himself, even vast numbers of times, even always. When one day a new Summa is written, it will surely cite Chesterton on this matter.

There is much more to say about all this, but it will have to be said another day, when God says "Do it again" to the sun. Crank up the amps, for He approves natural noisiness at a great moment, and surely this is one. Yeah!

--Dr. Thursday

P.S. Here is the promised sample about Islington. I think you will find it very instructive.

The Bible tells us to love our neighbours, [See Mt 22:39 quoting Lev 19:18] and also to love our enemies; [See Mt 5:44] probably because they are generally the same people. And there is a real human reason for this. You think of a remote man merely as a man; that is, you think of him in the right way. Suppose I say to you suddenly - "Oblige me by brooding on the soul of the man who lives at 351, High Street, Islington." Perhaps (now I come to think of it) you are the man who lives at 351, High Street, Islington; for this journal has a wide circulation. In that case substitute some other unknown address and pursue the intellectual sport. Now you will probably be broadly right about the man in Islington whom you have never seen or heard of, because you will begin at the right end - the human end. The man in Islington is at least a man. The soul of the man in Islington is certainly a soul. He also has been bewildered and broadened by youth; he also has been tortured and intoxicated by love; he also is sublimely doubtful about death. You can think about the soul of that nameless man who is a mere number in Islington High Street. But you do not think about the soul of your next-door neighbour. He is not a man; he is an environment. He is the barking of a dog; he is the noise of a pianola; he is a dispute about a party wall; he is drains that are worse than yours, or roses that are better than yours. Now, all these are the wrong ends of a man; and a man, like many other things in this world, such as a cat-o'-nine-tails, has a large number of wrong ends, and only one right one.
[ILN July 16 1910 CW28:563-4]
My goodness what a great post. Read it, and be amazed.
P.S. Your blogmistress has read Dr. Thursday novel, mentioned above, and thinks it Wonderful. Dr. Thursday needs some encouragement from the peanut gallery here to go for publication, which IMHO this novel needs. What do you think?

Ballade Contest in want of entries

The American Chesterton Society's own Sheila of Triolet contest fame is running a new Ballade contest, go check it out here and enter your best ballade!

More Responses to the New Yorker (and I don't mean the Obama cover)

The American Chesterton Society's own William Oddie (speaker at the 2008 conference) was quoted in this unfavorable account of the New Yorker article by the British Catholic Herald as a counter to the 9/10ths of the article which repeats the same anti-Semite accusations. (H/T Ellen F.)

And Rod Dreher pipes in.

And I still take umbridge and will be commenting again soon. As soon as I finish reading the terribly long article of which I am only half way through due to a lack of interest on my part in reading the rest of the diatribe against the man I love and refuse to see that I myself cause disinterest in--Chesterton.

American Chesterton Society Conference CDs are HERE!!!!!

Order yours NOW! Today! and Thanks! and Mark your calendars for Seattle in 2009! August 6-8th--be there!

20somethings: What is Manhood?

Joey G. reviews a fairly new book, called Gut Check by Tarek Saab.

I hadn't heard of him, but apparently he was a contestant on the reality TV show The Apprentice, with Donald Trump. He's using the fame that it generated to speak out about how he's flourished as a Catholic man in Corporate America. The book is loaded with Distributist type wisdom, and no less than half a dozen quotes from GKC.

I've posted a full review over at my new blog. JoeyG

Thanks, Joey.

Dr. Thursday's Post

The Well-Known Secret of Six
(but with a different vowel)

Today we face a very interesting topic, though it arises from only a single paragraph of Orthodoxy. It is, as you shall see when you read that paragraph, a fairly powerful word. It is, as GKC points out in the very important ILN essay for August 10, 1907 (also reprinted in All Things Considered), one of the three great secrets of all humanity. Assuming you were properly equipped when you started this little lit'ry outing, you should have in your packs a small laminated card with these three points listed upon it. You might take it out and refresh your memory:

1. Detective Story Secrets. The first is ... that of hide-and-seek, or the police novel, in which it permits privacy only in order to explode and smash privacy. The author makes first a fastidious secret of how the Bishop was murdered, only in order that he may at last declare, as from a high tower, to the whole democracy the great glad news that he was murdered by the governess. ... for its whole ultimate object is not to keep the secret, but to tell it.
2. [Today's Topic] There is a far more important class of things which humanity does agree to hide. They are so important that they cannot possibly be discussed here. But everyone will know the kind of things I mean. Upon ... such matters we are in a human freemasonry; the freemasonry is disciplined, but the freemasonry is free. We are asked to be silent about these things, but we are not asked to be ignorant about them. On the contrary, the fundamental human argument is entirely the other way. It is the thing most common to humanity that is most veiled by humanity. It is exactly because we all know that it is there that we need not say that it is there.
3. There is also a class of things on which the best civilisation does permit privacy, does resent all inquiry or explanation. This is in the case of things which need not be explained, because they cannot be explained, things too airy, instinctive, or intangible - caprices, sudden impulses, and the more innocent kind of prejudice.
[ILN Aug 10 1907 C27W524-5]

I have of course omitted the key word from point two; you can read it on your own cards. (If you have lost yours you ought to be able to think what it is rather easily. In any case you will learn it very shortly.

I have been a bit mysterious because this paragraph, and that very powerful topic, are mysterious. There will probably be some consternation about this matter; I cannot help it. All I can do is guide, and sometimes assist; it is not my path, but GKC's.

You might recall: we have been high up in the Elfland of our world, pondering the joint ideas of gratitude and of "The Doctrine of Conditional Joy". We are about to encounter a very short, but very interesting study of this - uh - certain secret. A secret known to everyone (at least over a certain age, I might add) and a wonderful, terrible, mysterious secret - one entirely bound up with this idea of "conditional joy".

Click here to proceed.

You may recall that last time I told you how even the most liberal of left-wing writers are incredibly conservative and tradition-bound - whenever they touch pen to paper, or finger to keyboard, and strive to bring their thoughts into one of the human languages known to others.

Yes, then even anarchists who disdain law, even rebels who hate all such things, bind themselves to powerful and utterly arbitrary rules, set long ago by people who most likely had no idea what they were doing. But unless they, like you and I, so bind themselves, they shall by no means have any possibility of communicating to others! Yes, for they cannot rebel against the alphabet.

If you do not believe me: you could find no stronger prohibition in any religion than those which are propounded to us by technology. No, they are far stronger, and much more intransigent. Without power you cannot boot your computer. Without a connection to a network you cannot do any - er - of the network things (I mean like e-mail or web pages). And without the magic password you cannot (for example) post on a blogg or even "log on" to a system. You cannot "choose" another way; there is no other way. You are bound to the alphabet called ASCII and its mysteries - which represent 01000001 as "A" and 01100001 as "a" and so forth! If your password wants a small "a" you cannot get away with a capital "A", no matter how much of a rebel you are. Indeed, even if you do not understand this code, even if you reject this code, unless you downshift and become like lower-case characters, you shall by no means enter the domain of the system...

There is another alphabet, written into nearly every cell of each human being. It is written in two letters, or rather a pair of letters: XX or XY. (I say nearly every, because the erythrocytes, or red blood cells are celibate. They have no nucleus, no chromosomes, no DNA. See here for more.) We are bound to that alphabet as well. Now, perhaps you will grasp what that secret is all about, and if not, you will find it clearly stated in GKC's next paragraph from Orthodoxy:

For this reason (we may call it the fairy godmother philosophy) I never could join the young men of my time in feeling what they called the general sentiment of revolt. I should have resisted, let us hope, any rules that were evil, and with these and their definition I shall deal in another chapter. But I did not feel disposed to resist any rule merely because it was mysterious. Estates are sometimes held by foolish forms, the breaking of a stick or the payment of a peppercorn: I was willing to hold the huge estate of earth and heaven by any such feudal fantasy. It could not well be wilder than the fact that I was allowed to hold it at all. At this stage I give only one ethical instance to show my meaning. I could never mix in the common murmur of that rising generation against monogamy, because no restriction on sex seemed so odd and unexpected as sex itself. To be allowed, like Endymion, to make love to the moon and then to complain that Jupiter kept his own moons in a harem seemed to me (bred on fairy tales like Endymion's) a vulgar anti-climax. Keeping to one woman is a small price for so much as seeing one woman. To complain that I could only be married once was like complaining that I had only been born once. It was incommensurate with the terrible excitement of which one was talking. It showed, not an exaggerated sensibility to sex, but a curious insensibility to it. A man is a fool who complains that he cannot enter Eden by five gates at once. Polygamy is a lack of the realization of sex; it is like a man plucking five pears in mere absence of mind. The aesthetes touched the last insane limits of language in their eulogy on lovely things. The thistledown made them weep; a burnished beetle brought them to their knees. Yet their emotion never impressed me for an instant, for this reason, that it never occurred to them to pay for their pleasure in any sort of symbolic sacrifice. Men (I felt) might fast forty days for the sake of hearing a blackbird sing. Men might go through fire to find a cowslip. Yet these lovers of beauty could not even keep sober for the blackbird. They would not go through common Christian marriage by way of recompense to the cowslip. Surely one might pay for extraordinary joy in ordinary morals. Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde.
[CW1:260-1]

--Dr. Thursday

Dr. Thursday's Post: The Sacramentality of Things

Books, Ancient and Modern

They call it "electronics" this gold boom,
The word for amber from the Greeks we get;
And keyboards now weave books upon its loom.
To Manisa of Turkey is our debt
For now their "northbound stone" is our diskette
Whereon a million letters spin and whir;
No dog-eared floppies you have seen, I bet...
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

Though books on disk make certain searches zoom,
They may succeed too well, to your regret,
A tenth of each book with ten words does bloom,
And paraphrase remains a constant threat,
And 'modern' scanned as 'modem' makes one fret,
This soup of letters I would rather stir
And eat - with a detective novelette.
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

No glowing AMBER words lift sleepless gloom,
Though saving scholars loads of time and sweat,
No CRTs are thrown across the room
When readers' expectations are not met,
Or leather-bound, with gold and jewels set
When with the written word one does concur.
The magnet serves, but print is foe or pet...
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

Oh fly caught in the web, trapped in the net,
Just scan a page which line noise cannot blur,
That touch and smell beyond all hardware yet...
Dale says it's tactile books that most prefer.

--Dr. Thursday

Previously published in Something Good To Read; used with
permission from the Editor-in-Chief.

When it appeared, the following note was appended:

We know that Manisa is the new name for Magnesia, the place in Asia
Minor which gives its name to magnets. But who is "Dale"? While we know
a lot of people named Dale, none of them live in Asia Minor. Perhaps it
is one of those poetry things we don't understand. That's why we have a
staff poet. Eds.

Note from Nancy: I don't know why, but when I just read this, I got the image of St. Jerome throwing a laptop across the room...

National Review: Chesterton’s Marvelous Year

National Review's current issue (July 14, 2008) contains this gem: "Chesterton’s Marvelous Year" by M. D. Aeschliman, who revisits The Man Who Was Thursday and more.

It is just a hundred years ago that one of the noblest and wittiest thinkers ever to write in our language, G. K. Chesterton, burst upon the scene with two masterworks. He is impossible to categorize in our specialized subject-area pigeonholes: He wrote vast amounts across a wide horizon, and must ultimately be categorized simply as a writer. In 1908 Chesterton published, among other things, two of the great works of modern literature, his novel The Man Who Was Thursday and his apologetic credo Orthodoxy. His essays and incidental journalism were also represented in a collection that same year, titled All Things Considered.

Although much shorter than the New Yorker article, this one at least praises Chesterton for who he really was.

H/T: Bob C.

Sir John Templeton dies

May he rest in peace.

Three degrees of separation: Templeton created the Templeton prize, which Fr. Stanley Jaki won, who is a Chestertonian scientist.

GKC on a Kindle: First Report

This is the first I've seen that someone has GKC on his Kindle. A paradoxical combination!

Something from G.K.'s Weekly

From the Combox came a request for this quote, which I thought more people would like to read, since it's so "right on!"

I checked the original essay in GK's Weekly, April 25, 1925. This seems to be what you are looking for:

About all those arguments affecting human equality, I myself always have one
feeling; which finds expression in a little test of my own. I shall begin to
take seriously those classifications of superiority and inferiority, when I
find a man classifying himself as inferior. It will be noted that Mr. Ford
does not say that he is only fitted to mind machines; he confesses frankly
that he is too fine and free and fastidious a being for such tasks. I shall
believe the doctrine when I hear somebody say: " I have only got the wits to
turn a wheel." That would be real, that would be realistic, that would be
scientific. That would be independent testimony that could not easily be
disputed. It is exactly the same, of course, with all the other
superiorities and denials of human equality, that are so specially
characteristic of a scientific age. It is so with the men who talk about
superior and inferior races; I never heard a man say:" Anthropology shows
that I belong to an inferior race." If he did, he might be talking like an
anthropologist; as it is, he is talking like a man, and not infrequently
like a fool. I have long hoped that I might some day hear a man explaining
on scientific principles his own unfitness for any important post or
privilege, say: " The world should belong to the free and fighting races,
and not to persons of that servile disposition that you will notice in
myself; the intelligent will know how to form opinions, but the weakness of
intellect from which I so obviously suffer renders my opinion manifestly
absurd on the face of them: there are indeed stately and god-like races- but
look at me! Observe my shapeless and fourth-rate features! Gaze, if you can
bear it, on my commonplace and repulsive face! "If I heard a man making a
scientific demonstration in that style, I might admit that he was really
scientific. But as it invariably happens, by a curious coincidence, that the
superior race is his own race, the superior type is his own type, and the
superior preference for work the sort of work he happens to prefer.

The New Yorker article

Our esteemed President and #1 Chestertonian, Dale Ahlquist, has responded to the New Yorker, and this will hopefully be published in the next issue of the same magazine. I am priviledged to read his response, and will give you a hint at it:

For those of us who love Chesterton, we are always distressed to see him subjected to any vile charge. But we’ve gotten a little tired of the charge of anti-Semitism...Mr. Gopnik has added a new technique to making the charge stick – declaring that Chesterton’s admirers should not defend Chesterton against the horrible accusation. Hm. That is certainly one way to end the debate. I would meekly suggest that a better way would be for people to stop repeating charges that have already been dropped.

There's more, much more, and as always, well written. Let's hope the New Yorker finds this fit to print, and will carry it in the next issue.

Chesterton on American Independence

Collected Works Volume 21: What I Saw in America; The Resurrection of Rome; Sidelights

I have never managed to lose my old conviction that travel narrows the mind. At least a man must make a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his mind. Indeed there is something touching and even tragic about the thought of the thoughtless tourist, who might have stayed at home loving Laplanders, embracing Chinamen, and clasping Patagonians to his heart in Hampstead or Surbiton, but for his blind and suicidal impulse to go and see what they looked like. This is not meant for nonsense; still less is it meant for the silliest sort of nonsense, which is cynicism. The human bond that he feels at home is not an illusion. On the contrary, it is rather an inner reality. Man is inside all men. In a real sense any man may be inside any men. But to travel is to leave the inside and draw dangerously near the outside. So long as he thought of men in the abstract, like naked toiling figures in some classic frieze, merely as those who labour and love their children and die, he was thinking the fundamental truth about them. By going to look at their unfamiliar manners and customs he is inviting them to disguise themselves in fantastic masks and costumes. Many modern internationalists talk as if men of different nationalities had only to meet and mix and understand each other. In reality that is the moment of supreme danger - the moment when they meet. We might shiver, as at the old euphemism by which a meeting meant a duel.

How can one not love a man who starts by turning the old "travel broadens the mind" phrase on its head, and ends with a duel?

This weekend, I invite you to sit back, relax, enjoy your freedom and independence, watch the fireworks, and read Chesterton. The perfect choice, shown above as a teaser, is What I Saw in America available in Collected Works 21. Happy 4th of July!

Dr. Thursday's Post: Glass

The Glory of Glass

As mentioned last time, I have lots of books nearby which help me do things. I thank God for my parents and teachers who taught me to read, and for the bounty God arranged for me to earn which has permitted me to buy and keep these wonderful treasures. Have you remembered to thank those responsible for your gifts?

One of them is somewhat dated two-volume set called Chemical Elements and Their Compounds, which I was reading in preparation for a large-scale poetry project. other things have gotten in the way, and I don't know when I will be able to get to... You want to know why a computer scientist is writing poems about elements? Perhaps you've forgotten this blogg is a CHESTERTONIAN blogg? There's no such thing as a different subject. [GKC, ILN Feb 17 1906 CW27:126] Remember, and write it in your notebook: "There is no such thing as an irrelevant thing in the universe; for all things in the universe are at least relevant to the universe."

Anyway, in this book from the 1950s I found the answer to that poor Vulcan's speculation - and so many others - on the idea of silicon-based life. People love to imagine that because silicon is so much like carbon, with its four bonds, there could be silicon-based life... maybe somewhere in the universe.

These people are not chemists; they don't know how the four bonds of silicon are different from the four bonds of carbon:

The idea that silicon has an organic chemistry of its own, rivalling that of carbon, is now realized to be untrue, owing to the instability of the Si-Si and Si-H links.
[Sidgwick, Chemical Elements and Their Compounds, I 555]

Sorry, it's not happening. However! I have chosen to begin today's journey into Orthodoxy with this bit from chemistry, not to abase silicon, but to exalt it. It is no insult to this wonderful and plentiful element to speak of its limitations - for we remember (all together): "Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame." [CW1:243] Very good. (Are you starting to have some clue as to why I wanted to write poems about the elements? I thought so. Hee hee.)

And the glory of silicon - well, not of silicon itself, which is a rather odd substance, and rarely found outside the laboratory. (People persist in saying "silicone" which is something else, almost a kind of rubber - it is a polymer of the form -SiR₂O- where R is a group such as methyl.) The silicon in an integrated circuit (the "chip" of modern electronics) has been treated with a variety of "doping" agents (things which change how it conducts electricity) and then etched into a fantastic multi-layered mosaic...They are one of the genuine marvels of our day, and an extreme form of grand cooperation among very different fields of study. Again, all very interesting and worth spending time on, but not today.

No, as I started to say, the glory of silicon is in one very famous, and very ancient, compound - one in which silicon is combined with two atoms of oxygen - SiO₂ - one of the main constituents of the Earth's crust, commonly known as quartz, and worked by humans for over 5000 years. From common sand we get the wonderful and highly Chestertonian thing called GLASS.

Now, last week I pointed to the humorous aspects of frogs and dragons - I have at least one bit of that sort of humour this week too, so when you have finished your drink you can proceed, and then I will tell you more about glass.

Swallow, then click here.
As a computer scientist, and a lunatic Chestertonian who moreover has spoken at three Chesterton Conferences, I usually have to find something suitable to express this unusual truth. I found it, and it is quite good - unfortunately the first time I tried to use it in a speech, I laughed so hard I could not continue for a couple of minutes. It's from "The Crime of Gabriel Gale" in The Poet and the Lunatics (Ah, you are seeing some more about my plans, are you?) when our hero has been caught observing a storm, and he says:

"I often stare at windows."

Yes, GG - me too. Even if the windows are not the Gates kind, most of the modern user-interface methods use such a layered, multi-panel approach. Yes, OK - it's funny. Now, let's get back to glass. And please don't bring up that Father Brown story about the absence of Mr. Glass, or I will start laughing. Hee hee hee.

OK, (ahem!) now that we have both regained some control... Recall where we are. We have just introduced very Chestertonian ideas: (1) the importance of gratitude and (2) the "Doctrine of Conditional Joy".

First, Chesterton urges us to be thankful for all things, even the dull or trivial or commonplace; this is the correct and healthy view of reality, and provides a working basis for true contemplation, whether it be scientific, literary, or philosophical. We're given this world (the KOSMOS, or universe) - all of it. We do NOT deserve it at all, and yet we have it. Even if it is not obvious what good it is - a frog, a sea-dragon, a telegraph, a pane of glass - we need to be grateful it is that and not something else. (An aside: this gets into a very deep piece of philosophy: the ontological idea of the perfection of being. But that is a steep and dangerous path. We shall merely note its blazes, perhaps for a future hike, and move on.)

Second, Chesterton points out that this grand delight in the ALL comes with a little warning label. We have the ALL, but only on conditions - and those conditions most likely seem crazily unrelated to anything. Even after some lengthy consideration, there seems to be no good reason for the imposition of such conditions, as slight as they may seem. But then (GKC asks) what's the reason for the grand gift? That's the point. Conditional Joy. (If this is not clear, we're about to see some more.)

These two ideas are the substrate (the foundation, the building blocks) of many fairy tales - and even some stories which are hardly considered such. But let us hear GKC:

This is the tone of fairy tales, and it is certainly not lawlessness or even liberty, though men under a mean modern tyranny may think it liberty by comparison. People out of Portland Gaol might think Fleet Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty. Fairy godmothers seem at least as strict as other godmothers. Cinderella received a coach out of Wonderland and a coachman out of nowhere, but she received a command - which might have come out of Brixton - that she should be back by twelve. Also, she had a glass slipper; and it cannot be a coincidence that glass is so common a substance in folk-lore. This princess lives in a glass castle, that princess on a glass hill; this one sees all things in a mirror; they may all live in glass houses if they will not throw stones. For this thin glitter of glass everywhere is the expression of the fact that the happiness is bright but brittle, like the substance most easily smashed by a housemaid or a cat. And this fairy-tale sentiment also sank into me and became my sentiment towards the whole world. I felt and feel that life itself is as bright as the diamond, but as brittle as the window-pane; and when the heavens were compared to the terrible crystal I can remember a shudder. I was afraid that God would drop the cosmos with a crash.
[CW1:259-260]

Ah, recall some weeks ago I said we would hear more about glass? Here it is - or perhaps I should say here it comes. But let us consider what we've just read, and not skip the unfamiliar parts.

What is Portland Gaol? Well, "Gaol" is the English spelling for "jail" (both come from a Latin word cavea = a cavity or cage).

What is Fleet Street? A street in London, built on the long-vanished Fleet River. But the term is often used as a symbol more than as a geographic reference, as it was (and still is, I am told) the centre of what we now call "The Media" - the site of all the big newspapers - which is why GKC mentions "journalists" in oblique apposition to it. (SO when GKC says "Fleet Street" you can just about always read "The Media" and you'll have it - just remember it's also a real place that GKC walked along...)

Now that you know these terms, please look at this one line again:

"People out of Portland Gaol might think Fleet Street free; but closer study will prove that both fairies and journalists are the slaves of duty."

I think that is a grand line. It was anticipated in GKC's Browning where he says this deeply profound line:

we forget that free speech is a paradox.

We are bound to tradition if we wish to communicate, far more tightly bound than those kept in Portland Gaol. Even "liberals" (modern sense) from the Far Left bow in humble submission as deeply as conservatives (modern sense) when they speak and write - they may try to redefine "is" but don't dare take that method very far - especially when it comes to their paychecks! Any of us, from whatever point in the political spectrum, might bend the rules when we speak or write - but we writers risk losing our readers if we go too far. Free speech is indeed a paradox, and so is free writing. No wonder St. John's most grand line - the grandest of the whole Gospel - is this: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us" - the line in the Last Gospel at which we genuflect, like in the English hobby of change-ringing of bells, where the great "tenor" bell is rung after all the others, as all the possible patterns are rung..., or the 01000111 pattern coming every 188 characters in an MPEG stream on cable TV - it keeps us in sync... Ahem. Sorry I was distracted; it is so thrilling to write about this. And someday, if you remind me, I will write something on what he means about fairies being the slaves of duty. But for now let us go back to GKC and glass.

Remember, however, that to be breakable is not the same as to be perishable. Strike a glass, and it will not endure an instant; simply do not strike it, and it will endure a thousand years. Such, it seemed, was the joy of man, either in elfland or on earth; the happiness depended on not doing something which you could at any moment do and which, very often, it was not obvious why you should not do. Now, the point here is that to me this did not seem unjust. If the miller's third son said to the fairy, "Explain why I must not stand on my head in the fairy palace," the other might fairly reply, "Well, if it comes to that, explain the fairy palace." If Cinderella says, "How is it that I must leave the ball at twelve?" her godmother might answer, "How is it that you are going there till twelve?" If I leave a man in my will ten talking elephants and a hundred winged horses, he cannot complain if the conditions partake of the slight eccentricity of the gift. He must not look a winged horse in the mouth. And it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture. The veto might well be as wild as the vision; it might be as startling as the sun, as elusive as the waters, as fantastic and terrible as the towering trees.
[CW1:260]

Yes, indeed - in Egypt there are pieces of glass some three or more thousand years old. The wonder of glass... In another essay GKC points out a marvel which seems to be lost on many people these days, even intelligent ones, even computer people, lit'ry people, and philosophers. Here are the critical verses:

...behind all designs for specific windows stands eternally the essential idea of a window; and the essential idea of a window is a thing which admits light. A dark window cannot be a good window, though it may be an excellent picture. ... There is an almost infinite variety of meanings which can be expressed by windows and pillars and all other forms of artistic workmanship - but they have their indwelling limitations. They cannot express darkness in a window or a surrender in a column of stone.
["The Meaning of the Theatre" in Lunacy and Letters]

It is worth considering. How does that link? Because carbon is not silicon! (A window might be made of carbon in its form of diamond, but it won't be nearly as beautiful as it would be if it were cut into dozens of facets.) Because a frog is not a sea-dragon, nor a telegraph! (See my writing from last week.) There is a variety of things in Fairy Land - and in the real world - and they really are different, and not to be confused, even when they are mixed. A wizard does not tell the hero "wave the dragon over the wand and it will vanish" - it only sounds like drunken babble.

Yes, there are some other side paths here, but let us attend to the main trail. We are exploring this "Doctrine of Conditional Joy" - and I must stress something here. We are NOT talking about this abstractly! This "Doctrine" (though it may sound academic, or theoretical) is a real idea, and had its powerful effect on GKC... like this trail, it leads us onward to something more. Re-read how he rephrased it:

"...it seemed to me that existence was itself so very eccentric a legacy that I could not complain of not understanding the limitations of the vision when I did not understand the vision they limited. The frame was no stranger than the picture."

Ah, you sigh. Now you grasp something deeper - and something unexpected - in that famous quote about the frame. Yes. And there's a reason GKC continually weaves, and re-weaves, and links, and re-links: Like a good mystery, like a good story, like a good computer program, like a good sweater or meal or family, like - like Reality - all things relate to all things - and to the ALL: "all things in the universe are at least relevant to the universe."

Recall, a few weeks ago, how I said something about GKC always dealing with vision? Like free speech, vision is a paradox too, with mystic and eccentric limitations. We must be grateful.

--Dr. Thursday
Thank you Dr. T. for this marvelous post.