But it would never occur to the Prussians not to ride their high horses with the freshest insolence for the far-off victory of Sedan; though on that very anniversary the star of their fate had turned scornful in the sky, and Von Kluck was in retreat from Paris.--The Appetite of Tyranny, 1915, CW5
"...before I have done with you, you shall thank God for the very ducks on the pond."Sometimes even philosophers are engineers. Sometimes even atheists are catholic.
-- G. K. Chesterton, Manalive
... I am black but comely at this moment: because the cyclostyle has blacked me. Fear not. I shall wash myself. ... I like the Cyclostyle ink; it is so inky. I do not think there is anyone who takes quite such a fierce pleasure in things being themselves as I do. The startling wetness of water excites and intoxicates me: the fieriness of fire, the steeliness of steel, the unutterable muddiness of mud. It is just the same with people.... When we call a man "manly" or a woman "womanly" we touch the deepest philosophy.Reality. Real ink. It's black. What a wonderful thing ink is - its most wonderful action is in being black - black but comely, as the Canticle of Canticles (1:4) has it. (The discussion will involve all three words; it ought to be quite a meaty topic.)
[GKC to his fiancée, July 8 1899, quoted in Ward's Gilbert Keith Chesterton 108-9]
It is the standing peculiarity of this curious world of ours that almost everything in it has been extolled enthusiastically and invariably extolled to the disadvantage of everything else. One after another almost every one of the phenomena of the universe has been declared to be alone capable of making life worth living. Books, love, business, religion, alcohol, abstract truth, private emotion, money, simplicity, mysticism, hard work, a life close to nature, a life close to Belgrave Square are every one of them passionately maintained by somebody to be so good that they redeem the evil of an otherwise indefensible world. Thus, while the world is almost always condemned in summary, it is always justified, and indeed extolled, in detail after detail. Existence has been praised and absolved by a chorus of pessimists. The work of giving thanks to Heaven is, as it were, divided ingeniously among them. Schopenhauer is told of as a kind of librarian in the House of God, to sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar, and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and the song of the bird.In case you were wondering, Varied Types is Chesterton's Twelve Types with eight more essays added in. The essays first appeared in The Daily News and The Speaker.
[GKC, Varied Types 32-33]
Þ or þ called "thorn"and
Ð or ð called "eth"But the printers would run out, or not have the "thorn" - especially in big fonts, like for title pages, or for POSTERS which got POSTED UP for people to see... (No they did NOT have bloggs back then; this was posting of paper with glue onto walls.) So the printers substituted the letter "Y" (Why, I don't quite know; I missed that lecture, or page) and to clue the reader in that there was something "contracted" about the word they were trying to represent, they "superscripted" the "e", thus we have "Ye" = "the".
I hung on to the remains of religion by one thin thread of thanks. I thanked whatever gods might be, not like Swinburne, because no life lived for ever, but because any life lived at all; not, like Henley for my unconquerable soul (for I have never been so optimistic about my own soul as all that) but for my own soul and my own body, even if they could be conquered. This way of looking at things, with a sort of mystical minimum of gratitude, was of course, to some extent assisted by those few of the fashionable writers who were not pessimists; especially by Walt Whitman, by Browning and by Stevenson; Browning's "God must be glad one loves his world so much", or Stevenson's "belief in the ultimate decency of things". But I do not think it is too much to say that I took it in a way of my own; even if it was a way I could not see clearly or make very clear. What I meant, whether or no I managed to say it, was this; that no man knows how much he is an optimist, even when he calls himself a pessimist, because he has not really measured the depths of his debt to whatever created him and enabled him to call himself anything. At the back of our brains, so to speak, there was a forgotten blaze or burst of astonishment at our own existence. The object of the artistic and spiritual life was to dig for this submerged sunrise of wonder; so that a man sitting in a chair might suddenly understand that he was actually alive, and be happy. There were other aspects of this feeling, and other arguments about it, to which I shall have to return. Here it is only a necessary part of the narrative; as it involves the fact that, when I did begin to write, I was full of a new and fiery resolution to write against the Decadents and the Pessimists who ruled the culture of the age.I hope that, if all else fails, computers, characters (upper and lower!), philosophy and engineering, we all preserve our own "thin thread of thanks" unbroken...
[GKC, Autobiography CW16:97, emphasis added]
When I walked along the pier at Ostend; and I heard some sailors uttering a measured shout as they laboured, and I remembered that sailors still sing in chorus while they work, and even sing different songs according to what part of their work they are doing. And a little while afterwards, when my sea journey was over, the sight of men working in the English fields reminded me again that there are still songs for harvest and for many agricultural routines. And I suddenly wondered why if this were so it should be quite unknown, for any modern trade to have a ritual poetry. How did people come to chant rude poems while pulling certain ropes or gathering certain fruit, and why did nobody do anything of the kind while producing any of the modern things? Why is a modern newspaper never printed by people singing in chorus? Why do shopmen seldom, if ever, sing?Addition. Sums. Adding. To be precise, a closed, associative, operation with an identity and an inverse, defined over sets both finite and infinite... While most mathematics is thought "hard" (if you are a doll) or "difficult" (if you are not Newton or Cauchy or Euler or Gauss) it is nearly a truism of language to speak of things being "as easy as addition" or "as simple as two plus two equals four" - even for such a non-math guy as our Uncle Gilbert:
If reapers sing while reaping, why should not auditors sing while auditing and bankers while banking? If there are songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a boat, why are there not songs for all the separate things that have to be done in a bank? As the train from Dover flew through the Kentish gardens, I tried to write a few songs suitable for commercial gentlemen. Thus, the work of bank clerk when casting up columns might begin with a thundering chorus in praise of Simple Addition.
"Up my lads and lift the ledgers, sleep and ease are o'er.
Hear the Stars of Morning shouting: 'Two and Two are four.'
Though the creeds and realms are reeling, though the sophists roar,
Though we weep and pawn our watches, Two and Two are Four."
[GKC, "The Little Birds Who Won't Sing" in Tremendous Trifles]
Mr. Blatchford, with colossal simplicity, explained to millions of clerks and workingmen that the mother is like a bottle of blue beads and the father is like a bottle of yellow beads; and so the child is like a bottle of mixed blue beads and yellow. He might just as well have said that if the father has two legs and the mother has two legs, the child will have four legs. Obviously it is not a question of simple addition or simple division of a number of hard detached "qualities," like beads. It is an organic crisis and transformation of the most mysterious sort; so that even if the result is unavoidable, it will still be unexpected. It is not like blue beads mixed with yellow beads; it is like blue mixed with yellow; the result of which is green, a totally novel and unique experience, a new emotion.Here already we find something transcendent about addition - I do not mean the underlying argument GKC is making - I mean the curious fact that there are some kinds of "addition" which do not work like the numbers. In the world of paint pigments, blue plus yellow equals green. But let us look a little at numbers and find out what is going on, and perhaps we shall also have a "novel and unique experience": the "new emotion" which provokes praise of addition.
[GKC, What's Wrong With the World, CW4:155]
Written English:
Two plus two equals four.
Algebraic notation:
2 + 2 = 4
Latin:
II et II est IV.
Typical personal computer (x86-based):
Given that EAX contains 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0010
and EBX contains 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0010
after performing ADD EAX,EBX
EAX contains 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0000 0100.
Real addition:The last one is about as close as I can come (here in the e-cosmos) to the "thing-in-itself"; the others forms are "representations". They are ways of indicating - even suggesting - the true details contained only in the last display. You see, there is a real thing, addition, which has a real meaning in the real world. Get out some coins (I don't care what value they are) - or some paper clips - or a few somethings. Put two of them in front of you, on your left side, and two of them on your right side. You see there are two here, and also two there. (Of course you do. It's simple!) Now slide them together into a little heap. Now there are four, even though you might be able to tell which two were on the left and which two were on the right - but that doesn't matter - there are four together, which are somehow the same as two and another two: though they were apart, now they are joined.
**
(stuck together with)
**
(is the same as)
****
An aside: If you need more on this, I direct you to The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, in which the Mathemagician presents a good commentary on infinity. His brother, King Azaz, makes the same comment, though in somewhat more veiled language. As you may know, our hero Milo receives infinite gifts from each of them, but then I must not reveal too much. Go and read it yourself.In other words, our grasp of the abstraction implicit in numbers and addition is somehow derived from the supernatural trait called the imperishability of the soul: since WE can imagine talking on-and-on, long enough to finish the addition, we can grasp the general notion of addition. Now for the shock.
...very uneducated rich men who loudly demanded education. And among the marks of their ignorance and stupidity was the particular mark that they regarded letters and figures as dead things, quite separate from each other and from a general view of life. They thought of a boy learning his letters as something quite cut off, for instance, from what is meant by a man of letters. They thought a calculating boy could be made like a calculating machine. When somebody said to them, therefore, "These things must be taught in a spiritual atmosphere", they thought it was nonsense; they had a vague idea that it meant that a child could only do a simple addition sum when surrounded with the smell of incense. But they thought simple addition much more simple than it is. When the Catholic controversialist said to them, "Even the alphabet can be learnt in a Catholic way", they thought he was a raving bigot, they thought he meant that nobody must ever read anything but a Latin missal.
But he meant what he said, and what he said is thoroughly sound psychology. There is a Catholic view of learning the alphabet; for instance, it prevents you from thinking that the only thing that matters is learning the alphabet; or from despising better people than yourself, if they do not happen to have learnt the alphabet.
[GKC, The Common Man 166-7]
One of Charles's great-grandsons was the writer GK Chesterton, who worked for the firm [the Chesterton family real estate business] very briefly before deciding it was not for him.I was not aware that Gilbert had actually worked in his father's business. Have I missed something?
For the first time in my [Sean Dailey's] four+ years as editor, we made deadline. The December issue was sent to press yesterday, meaning the issue will be mailed to subscribers before the end of November. Readers will get their December issue in December, rather than in Lent, ;-).
This issue contains some Harry Potter discussions. There is also a very special treat: a 13-page spread consisting of an illustrated version of Chesterton's poem "The Wise Men." (Illustrated by Beatrice Wilczynski, [scroll down]who died in 1984).
A second very special treat is a color cover by Ben Hatke. Finally, there is a write-up of the Rochester Chesterton Conference, on Chesterton and Conversion.--from Sean Dailey, Editor-in-Chief, Gilbert
if I have never experienced such a thing as green I cannot even say that my nose is not green. It may be as green as possible for all I know, if I have really no experience of greenness. So we shouted at each other and shook the room; because metaphysics is the only thoroughly emotional thing. And the difference between us was very deep, because it was a difference as to the object of the whole thing called broad-mindedness or the opening of the intellect. For my friend said that he opened his intellect as the sun opens the fans of a palm tree, opening for opening's sake, opening infinitely for ever. But I said that I opened my intellect as I opened my mouth, in order to shut it again on something solid. I was doing it at the moment. And as I truly pointed out, it would look uncommonly silly if I went on opening my mouth infinitely, for ever and ever.
[from "The Extraordinary Cabman" in Tremendous Trifles]
"A new philosophy generally means in practice the praise of some old vice. "Thank you Dr. T!
that is from ILN January 6, 1906 CW27:98 also printed as "The Methuselahite" in All Things Considered
We also hear the the First Ammendment is under siege. I think that's true. I don't believe anyone here would disagree with the proposition that the quality of public discourse isn't what it once was or that it presently achieves levels of excellence and depth that it desperately needs to reach.Although Mr. Snow could use some grammar lessons. "frequently have always"?
Yet—while it may be tempting to blame the usual suspects—the government, interest groups, angry factionalists—those forces frequently have always tried to restrict the free flow of ideas, and they always have failed.
They're not the culprits here. Instead, there's a new an unexpected menace on the block: The media.
Anomalies do matter very much, and do a great deal of harm; abstract illogicalities do matter a great deal, and do a great deal of harm. And this for a reason that anyone at all acquainted with human nature can see for himself. All injustice begins in the mind. And anomalies accustom the mind to the idea of unreason and untruth. Suppose I had by some pre-historic law the power of forcing every man in Battersea to nod his head three times before he got out of bed. The practical politicians might say that this power was a harmless anomaly; that it was not a grievance. It could do my subjects no harm; it could do me no good. The people of Battersea, they would say, might safely submit to it. But the people of Battersea could not safely submit to it, for all that. If I had nodded their heads for them for fifty years I could cut off their heads for them at the end of it with immeasurably greater ease. For there would have permanently sunk into every man's mind the notion that it was a natural thing for me to have a fantastic and irrational power. They would have grown accustomed to insanity. GKC ILN March 10 1906 CW 27:139
It is a real case against conventional hagiography that it sometimes tends to make all saints seem to be the same. Whereas in fact no men are more different than saints; not even murderers.Today, November 1, is the feast of All Saints - that is, all those who have died and gotten to heaven, and who don't have their own special feast day. Of course it's really the feast of everyone in heaven, even those who do have special days, or maybe two (like St. John the Baptist) or a bunch, like the Blessed Virgin Mary. For now, until the paperwork gets done, this is when we really may celebrate Frances and Gilbert Chesterton - and Pierre Duhem, Galvani and Agnesi (see here for more about the witchcraft of this brilliant Catholic!) and Biringuccio and Buridan and Pasteur and Galileo... Oh, have I been emphasizing scientists? (Gee I wonder how that happened.) How about Francis Thompson and J. R. R. Tolkien and Belloc and Baring? How about Dante and Guido of Arezzo (who gave us ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la) and Olivier Messien (a great organ-composer of the 20th century)? How about Alcuin and Charlemagne?
[GKC, St. Thomas Aquinas CW2:478]
A Positivist, as he figures in the life and correspondence of the Huxley and Arnold period, meant something much more definite than a rationalist who rested all his views on positive knowledge. A Positivist meant a Comtist, and a Comtist meant a good deal. Comte had a complete new religion, or rather, a new Church; for it was modelled throughout on the Catholic Church. It had a liturgy. It had a calendar. I believe it had vestments. I am sure it had saints' days dedicated to Darwin or Newton. I do not know in what the ceremonial consisted, or what were the vestments worn. Perhaps they all wore tails on Darwin Day. Perhaps they celebrated Sir Isaac Newton by dancing round an apple-tree and pelting each other with apples.So does this mean I think (or Chesterton thought) we ought to celebrate Darwin Day too? Well, you'll find out. You see, like Aquinas, GKC could see the brilliance even in the error of another, sift it, and take advantage of it. And he then revealed it, even if the heretic had hidden it.
[GKC ILN Jan 27 1923 CW33:30-31]
In an age of dusty modernity, when beauty was thought of as something barbaric and ugliness as something sensible, he alone saw that men must always have the sacredness of mummery. He saw that while the brutes have all the useful things, the things that are truly human are the useless ones. He saw the falsehood of that almost universal notion of to-day, the notion that rites and forms are something artificial, additional, and corrupt. Ritual is really much older than thought; it is much simpler and much wilder than thought. A feeling touching the nature of things does not only make men feel that there are certain proper things to say; it makes them feel that there are certain proper things to do. The more agreeable of these consist of dancing, building temples, and shouting very loud; the less agreeable, of wearing green carnations and burning other philosophers alive. But everywhere the religious dance came before the religious hymn, and man was a ritualist before he could speak. If Comtism had spread the world would have been converted, not by the Comtist philosophy, but by the Comtist calendar. ... A man who has faith must be prepared not only to be a martyr, but to be a fool. It is absurd to say that a man is ready to toil and die for his convictions when he is not even ready to wear a wreath round his head for them. I myself, to take a corpus vile, am very certain that I would not read the works of Comte through for any consideration whatever. But I can easily imagine myself with the greatest enthusiasm lighting a bonfire on Darwin Day.Why? And why do I mention a bunch of names from the past, both important and barely remembered?
[GKC, Heretics CW1:87]
But the world has to thank [the ancient world] for many things which it considers common and necessary; and the creators of those common things ought really to have a place among the heroes of humanity. If we were at rest in a real paganism, instead of being restless in a rather irrational reaction from Christianity, we might pay some sort of pagan honour to these nameless makers of mankind. We might have veiled statues of the man who first found fire or the man who first made a boat or the man who first tamed a horse. And if we brought them garlands or sacrifices, there would be more sense in it than in disfiguring our cities with cockney statues of stale politicians and philanthropists.Indeed. Today, perhaps more than on any other day, we need to recall the real words that begin the Prayer of Thanks:
[GKC, The Everlasting Man CW2:200]
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