Happy, holy, blessed Thanksgiving, everyone

Peace.

A Word to All You Harry Potterites Out There

Here is an amazing new book about Harry Potter.

I became aware of this book when the author was doing her research, and wrote me asking me about J.K. Rowling's Chestertonian connections. I gladly provided her with the information I had (all of which I'd previously revealed to you on this blog, about Jo's name being on the roster of the UK Chesterton Society, etc.) and in return, she's mailed me one of the first copies of her lovely book, Does Harry Potter Tickle Sleeping Dragons?

If the title reminds you of a certain quote by CS Lewis, it should. I had this quote in my book, The Mystery of Harry Potter, too.

If my book left any doubts in your mind about the Christianity of JKR or the Christian undertones: Remember how I said it was "Christian Fiction in Disguise"? Well, this new book by Harry Potter expert Nancy Solon Villaluz is going to convince you beyond the shadow of a doubt that my statement is absolutely spot on.

Oops, apparently I tickled something there.
Revised copy:

For you followers of any of the Harry Potter analysis-type books out there: I believe this book does more, goes deeper, tells more, explains more, finds out more: in short, this book takes off where my own book ends. And maybe some other books, too.

So anyone with a continued interest in Harry Potter, or anyone who would like to definitively prove to someone that these books are, indeed, Christian fiction, that Rowling is a fellow Inkling along with Lewis and Tolkien, although remaining, "slightly different" as Jo herself has said and Villaluz quotes frequently in her book: then Go Get This Book. Put it on your Christmas or other Religious Holiday Wish List. This lady has done a TON of research, more than anyone I've ever read on this subject. I was enormously impressed. Elephantinely impressed.

OK, just to tantalize you just a bit further--speaking of Christmas--Villaluz has actually counted up the number of times the word "Christmas" is used in Harry Potter's 4000 page series. She has compared the British and US editions. She has listened to every podcast and interview Jo Rowling has ever given. She even discovered Jo's real thoughts and backstory about Dumbledore--and it's so amazing, I know why the press never picked up on it. I think you will be rather pleased at the results of that research.

Bottom line: This is the best Harry Potter in-depth uncover-all-secrets-the-author-tried-to-hide book ever.

Christmas? Think about shopping locally

With the Chestertonianly paradoxical name of American Independent Business Alliance, but with the Chestertonian ideals of shopping locally, and supporting local owner/operators, I recommend looking here to encourage you to shop locally this Christmas.

Rome

When GKC went to Rome, he found the Egyptian obelisks rather funny, and so did I. Chesterton said they sort of capped the pagan with the Christian (they all have crosses or saints up there on them now).

My impression was that they were sort of used as candle stands. Like you'd find an old stick, say to yourself, well, maybe in the past they used this for something, but I can stick a candle on it and make it work to light up this room.

Or maybe that's too old-fashioned of an example.

Maybe the obelisks are sort of tall statue bases. What's important about a statue-base/statue combination is not the statue base, although they do have some orphan statue bases hanging around the Vatican Museums, looking a bit forlorn. But what's important is what's on the statue base. There must be another word for statue base, but right now my jet-lagged brain can't come up with it. Our entire family woke up this morning at 5am--go figure! Thank goodness we didn't have this kind of jet lag on the other part of the journey.

So, my impression of the obelisks is that they are giant candle stands. They do still have their hieroglyphics on them, which was interested as a decorative kind of thing, but the cross or the statue was the important thing.

Chuck Colson Likes the Chesterton Academy idea

Audio of this talk here.

Back From Rome...

I want to thank Dr. Thursday for his fun posts while I was away. Don't you think he did a great job?

I know you want to see some pictures of Rome, so here's a start.
1. The Pope, an unexpected visit on Wednesday to the Pope's general audience. No tickets, but we had front row seats when he came around in the popemobile (no longer in bullet proof glass, I might add.)
2.St. Peter's at night.
3.From the dome of St. Peter's--with a rainbow, quite beautiful.
4. Our family, at Cardinal Este's villa in Tivoli.

G. K. Chesterton - A Superlative Engineer

I am late, but at least I write after lunch - and I shall post so as to leave our Roman Traveller's great posting atop mine. I am glad she is home safely! What a great adventure. Now she can write a book: What I Saw In Roma. Hee hee.

Again, I take the dragon by the horns, or perhaps I ought to say by the violas, a far more hazardous instrument. (Musicians tell me there are far more jokes about the viola than about any other instrument.) I know how grave a risk I run in my constant harping (viola-ing?) on the greatness of our Uncle Gilbert K. Chesterton as a scientist. I shall dig myself a hole seven times deeper by claiming GKC to be a superlative engineer as well. And some former co-workers, perhaps former fellow students, shall write me nasty e-mails, wanting to see his blueprints, his bridges, his engines, his valves or his ATM NICs, his GUIs and APIs, his flowcharts or his circuit diagrams... (I remember Lucy berating Schroder about how Beethoven never had his picture on a bubble-gum card: "Chesterton doesn't have a unit of measure named after him, does he? How can you say he was a great engineer if he doesn't have a unit of measure named after him?" Hee hee. Though there is a unit called the gilbert, the unit of magentomotive force, equivalent to 10 over 4 pi ampere-turns. Oh yes.) And I shall receive irate phone calls: "Name one IC he worked on, one satellite he helped launch, a bridge he built..."

He has done more, far more. His engineering is of a kind which is far harder than those simple tasks. Remember, he wrote "The rebuilding of this bridge between science and human nature is one of the greatest needs of mankind." [GKC The Defendant 75]

Yesterday, I heard someone mention the hilarious word "agile" in the context of engineering - and of course I thought of GKC. I had no idea what the word meant in that context - but I thought of one of the three recordings of GKC, where admitted to being a journalist, but emphatically denied that he was a "pressman":

A pressman means a very different sort of person from me. One glance at me would show that I had never crashed through a skylight in order to interview a celebrity - that I had never slid through a door that was almost shut in my face by somebody who wanted to keep me out of his bedroom - that I had never performed any of those things that are the glory of journalism...
[Address to the Canadian Literary Society, 1933, recorded by the BBC. Quoted in The Chesterton Review 69 (XXII#4, Nov 1996)

Clearly GKC was not "agile". But in the engineering context, it means something or other - it almost sounded like it was about actually getting work done rather than talking about the idea of getting work done. I may have misunderstood, but it apparently means one does work instead of sitting around talking about it, or writing lots of papers about how a meeting might be held to decide to write a paper on how the work might be done if someone else did it, or something. (Whew.) I am not sure about these sorts of techniques, because when I do my work, I don't have a term like "agile" to describe it, and I do it the Chestertonian way anyhow.

Huh?

As Chesterton told us, "I revert to the doctrinal methods of the thirteenth century, inspired by the general hope of getting something done." [GKC Heretics Cw1:46] Yes. In order to write the tens of thousands of lines of code that I have to write - a far more tedious and boring job than writing Thursday posts - I must sit in a chair and think for long periods, and pray, and apply various formal tools commonly in use for 700 years or so... it is lots of fun once I am done. Indeed, like John Dickson Carr's chunky Sir Henry Merrivale, known familiarly as H.M. or the Old Man, who solved mysteries by "sittin' and thinkin'," and like GKC, I am the precise inverse of an agile engineer, but I almost never sit around wishing for someone else to do the job. That's why I have a computer, after all, and I work very hard to be sure it does its fair share. But this posting is not about me, my work, or "agile" of any kind. It's about engineering, as hard as it will be for you to believe, and how one needs to know about that field in order to study our next excerpt from Orthodoxy.

(( click here when you feel agile... ))


You may recall that in recent Thursday postings I have made various hints and comments about words like "evolution" and "design". It would sicken most people to learn that there really are biologists - yes, even medical researchers pretending to work on "cures" for cancer - who believe that "software" can only occur in the way they believe "life" occurs - by random chance. Yes. Given enough time, the "internet" will "evolve" almost any imaginable piece of "software". Utterly insane. Just as we find countless examples of toasters and word processors in the Devonian strata, or jet engines, or - ah, I have it! DNA sequencing machines and microscopes - layered with other evolutionary "failures" like someone's cable TV spot distribution software. (Hee hee. Who could Dr. Thursday mean?) Yes, certainly! There is no designer, no master-mind Author of Things who sits and thinks and then enacts his plan. (Does Dr. Thursday mean "God" here? No.) It's all random, and wa always there... just as the ever-evolving supercomputers shall soon find the entire text of "Orthodoxy", "Jurassic Park", "Contact" and "King Lear" within the decimal expansion for pi divided by the square root of 2008. It will be formatted in HTML and all ready for posting. Yes, yes.

No. Not at all. (Dr. Thursday was being bitterly sarcastic, wasn't he? Oh my, yes; he tries; it's sad because it's all too real.) We may not be scientists, or engineers, or philosophers, but we know the difference between something designed and something accidental, which is what they mean by random chance, because we are not utterly insane. Most of the time when we do things, we use thirteenth century metaphysics, even those of us who are not engineers, because we have common sense, the first tool of all engineering - which means we hope to get things done. We work by a plan, by a design - that is, towards a purpose - a goal or end.

And so we must hear GKC say it, for yet another time, spelling out the concept again, in order that we may not walk away thinking the opposite:

This, however, is hardly our main point at present; I have admitted it only in order to show how constantly, and as it were accidentally, the key would fit the smallest doors. Our main point is here, that if there be a mere trend of impersonal improvement in Nature, it must presumably be a simple trend towards some simple triumph. One can imagine that some automatic tendency in biology might work for giving us longer and longer noses. But the question is, do we want to have longer and longer noses? I fancy not; I believe that we most of us want to say to our noses, "thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed": we require a nose of such length as may ensure an interesting face. But we cannot imagine a mere biological trend towards producing interesting faces; because an interesting face is one particular arrangement of eyes, nose, and mouth, in a most complex relation to each other. Proportion cannot be a drift: it is either an accident or a design. So with the ideal of human morality and its relation to the humanitarians and the anti-humanitarians. It is conceivable that we are going more and more to keep our hands off things: not to drive horses; not to pick flowers. We may eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by argument; not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing. The ultimate apotheosis would appear to be that of a man sitting quite still, nor daring to stir for fear of disturbing a fly, nor to eat for fear of incommoding a microbe. To so crude a consummation as that we might perhaps unconsciously drift. But do we want so crude a consummation? Similarly, we might unconsciously evolve along the opposite or Nietzschean line of development - superman crushing superman in one tower of tyrants until the universe is smashed up for fun. But do we want the universe smashed up for fun? Is it not quite clear that what we really hope for is one particular management and proposition of these two things; a certain amount of restraint and respect, a certain amount of energy and mastery? If our life is ever really as beautiful as a fairy-tale, we shall have to remember that all the beauty of a fairy-tale lies in this: that the prince has a wonder which just stops short of being fear. If he is afraid of the giant, there is an end of him; but also if he is not astonished at the giant, there is an end of the fairy-tale. The whole point depends upon his being at once humble enough to wonder, and haughty enough to defy. So our attitude to the giant of the world must not merely be increasing delicacy or increasing contempt: it must be one particular proportion of the two - which is exactly right. We must have in us enough reverence for all things outside us to make us tread fearfully on the grass. We must also have enough disdain for all things outside us, to make us, on due occasion, spit at the stars. Yet these two things (if we are to be good or happy) must be combined, not in any combination, but in one particular combination. The perfect happiness of men on the earth (if it ever comes) will not be a flat and solid thing, like the satisfaction of animals. It will be an exact and perilous balance; like that of a desperate romance. Man must have just enough faith in himself to have adventures, and just enough doubt of himself to enjoy them.
[CW1:317-8]

We have a curious quote here, and you may be wondering what GKC is quoting: "thus far, and no farther; and here shall thy proud point be stayed" This is from Job 38:11, which has "waves" where GKC writes "point".

But Doctor - again you tug on my lab coat - I thought you say he was an engineer? It sounds like he's being a lit'ry man, a fairy-tale writer, like that awesome Tolkien.

Excuse me. What - I beg you to tell me - is the difference? Both are matters of design, of attention to detail, of sheer stunning art, and slowly thought-out, careful yet powerful use of natural resources:

From Buddha and his wheel to Akhen Aten and his disc, from Pythagoras with his abstraction of number to Confucius with his religion of routine, there is not one of them that does not in some way sin against the soul of a story. There is none of them that really grasps this human notion of the tale, the test, the adventure; the ordeal of the free man. Each of them starves the story-telling instinct, so to speak, and does something to spoil human life considered as a romance; either by fatalism (pessimist or optimist) and that destiny that is the death of adventure; or by indifference and that detachment that is the death of drama; or by a fundamental scepticism that dissolves the actors into atoms; or by a materialistic limitation blocking the vista of moral consequences; or a mechanical recurrence making even moral tests monotonous; or a bottomless relativity making even practical tests insecure. There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgment.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:378-9, emphasis added]

Yes. And so do all engineering projects.

I know this is hard to take. It cannot be any harder for a cable TV company to swallow that their software development owes so much to a fat English journalist and the writings of some Popes. But it happens to be true, and it demonstrates that Chesterton had an excellent engineering acumen, even though he was mostly considered to be a "lit'ry man".

As usual, GKC now reviews our advance, before taking another step:

This, then, is our second requirement for the ideal of progress. First, it must be fixed; second, it must be composite. It must not (if it is to satisfy our souls) be the mere victory of some one thing swallowing up everything else, love or pride or peace or adventure; it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and relation. I am not concerned at this moment to deny that some such good culmination may be, by the constitution of things, reserved for the human race. I only point out that if this composite happiness is fixed for us it must be fixed by some mind; for only a mind can place the exact proportions of a composite happiness. If the beatification of the world is a mere work of nature, then it must be as simple as the freezing of the world, or the burning up of the world. But if the beatification of the world is not a work of nature but a work of art, then it involves an artist. And here again my contemplation was cloven by the ancient voice which said, "I could have told you all this a long time ago. If there is any certain progress it can only be my kind of progress, the progress towards a complete city of virtues and dominations where righteousness and peace contrive to kiss each other. An impersonal force might be leading you to a wilderness of perfect flatness or a peak of perfect height. But only a personal God can possibly be leading you (if, indeed, you are being led) to a city with just streets and architectural proportions, a city in which each of you can contribute exactly the right amount of your own colour to the many coloured coat of Joseph."

Twice again, therefore, Christianity had come in with the exact answer that I required. I had said, "The ideal must be fixed," and the Church had answered, "Mine is literally fixed, for it existed before anything else." I said secondly, "It must be artistically combined, like a picture"; and the Church answered, "Mine is quite literally a picture, for I know who painted it."
[CW1:319]

We should recall that "Joseph's many-coloured coat" is from Genesis 37:4, and the "righteousness and peace kiss" is from Psalm 84:11 (85:10).

You will note here again the words of good engineering practice which might be out of Roebling's notes on the design of the Brooklyn bridge: "it must be a definite picture composed of these elements in their best proportion and relation".

Or do you think that bridge evolved too? How quaint. I expect random chance will reply. Eventually. If you know automata theory, you've seen it before; it's all in A^*, called A-star, the set of all strings of finite length over a given alphabet. Unlike the monkeys with typewriters, A^* actually does contain Orthodoxy, "King Lear" and the rest - and even this posting - and any and every comment you can make. Really. It makes you wonder what really "evolves". As Dogbert once told Dilbert the engineer, commenting on his exceedingly poor poetry, "Three monkeys. Ten minutes."

More on Gype

I really wanted to write about Water today, in the waning hope that I might actually begin my studies of food. Yes, that sounds odd, I know, but even God seems to have started with water, and even the modern physics exalts "That Which Gives Birth To Water" as the First of all existing elements - though they use the word "hydrogen" since it is shorter and less tongue twisty. A proton being a hydrogen nucleus cannot help that it truly is the Kernel (Latin nucleus = kernel) of the First (Greek proton = first). Hee hee. So I got a little into a comment, but now find that I must talk a little more about Gype.

Which means I must talk about two things. Humour and Rules.

It is, as all computer scientists know - ahem, as all ontologists know - well, as anyone with any inkling of common sense must know - that it is impossible to be funny without rules. A word which has no meaning cannot be the root of a joke, the answer to a riddle, the pivot of a paradox, or so forth. In fact, we might go so far as to claim that Humour is the Eighth Gift of the Holy Spirit, as Chesterton observed:

What we [English] call wit they [the French] call esprit - spirit. When they want to call a man witty, they call him spirituel. They actually use the same word for wit which they use for the Holy Ghost.
["Heroic Wit" in Lunacy and Letters]

Yes. If a door is not a door when it is a jar, or a garbage truck is not something that has four wheels and flies, well - there has to be some sort of rule that makes such things possible.

Now, Gype is possible. It is a game which is intended simply and only (in the absolute sense) for fun, for enjoyment, for delight. I tried to suggest this by quoting a near-Chestertonian example from "Calvin and Hobbes" with his Calvin-Ball score of "Q to 12" which is quite a respectable score in Gype, assuming... well. Never mind what we are assuming.

But the very idea that Gype can exist without rules? Let us see what Chesterton says:

Friendship must be physically dirty if it is to be morally clean. It must be in its shirt sleeves. The chaos of habits that always goes with males when left entirely to themselves has only one honorable cure; and that is the strict discipline of a monastery. Anyone who has seen our unhappy young idealists in East End Settlements losing their collars in the wash and living on tinned salmon will fully understand why it was decided by the wisdom of St. Bernard or St. Benedict, that if men were to live without women, they must not live without rules.
[GKC What's Wrong With the World CW4:96]

Though that may be a bit misleading, since women can play Gype, and it has nothing to do with monasteries. (I have even heard that there are orders of monks whose Rule does not forbid the playing of Gype, even during Lent. This is a good thing. Gype is also among the most penitential of games.)

A shrewd commenter has indicated that "the rules for Gype are determined democratically" [Alas I have lost the reference but he has been busy goggling for Gype games in the e-cosmos so he will be sure to re-link for me.] This is an excellent insight, and is found almost verbatim in Chesterton, to wit (hee hee):

The people know that life cannot be conducted without rules. The people is the maker and keeper of all custom, tradition and convention, just as it is the maker and (except, perhaps, in modern England) the keeper of all religion.
[GKC Daily News for June 10, 1905 in The Apostle and the Wild Ducks]

Which links in a most dramatic sense to two other critical lines we must understand if we wish to learn more about Gype:

A wall is like ((a)) rule; and the gates are like the exceptions that prove the rule. The man making it has to decide where his rule will run and where his exception shall stand. He cannot have a city that is all gates any more than a house that is all windows; nor is it possible to have a law that consists entirely of liberties.
[GKC The New Jerusalem CW20:229]

And this, perhaps the foundation quote from which Gype once sprung:

when people are in exceptionally high spirits, really wild with freedom and invention, they always must, and they always do, create institutions. When men are weary they fall into anarchy; but while they are gay and vigorous they invariably make rules. This, which is true of all the churches and republics of history, is also true of the most trivial parlour game or the most unsophisticated meadow romp. We are never free until some institution frees us, and liberty cannot exist till it is declared by authority.
[GKC "The Banner of Beacon" in Manalive]

So you see that it is an ontological imperative: If Gype is for fun, then Gype must have rules, very stern and powerful rules, (which means, typically, referees with water-pistols) or it shall not be fun at all.

It would be quite pleasing at this point to consult a short and simple guide in which Chesterton lists several rules, most of which happen to relate in an ontological sense to Gype, but which he rather pedantically uses to explain how to write a detective story. [It was in G. K.'s Weekly for October 17, 1925, and reprinted in The Spice of Life] The first, of course, is that detective stories are not about darkness, but about light - that is, not about keeping something hidden, but revealing a secret. (Gype is about fun, not about winning.) The second is that the pivot of the detective story, the cardinal, the hinge on which it turns (see Tolkien for deeper meaning of "turn" in fantasy & fairy tales) must be simple. In the same way, any single round, inning, hand or period of Gype, in any of the countless forms it may take, must also be simple, regardless of the cumbersomeness of athletic gear, the size of the board, the variety of its pieces, the number of players, and the rest. Thirdly, the thing must revolve on something familiar, easily forgotten or overlooked, which means why a broom must appear on a football field (No, Harry, for sweeping, not flying) or a queen (Alice asks "of spades? or white?") on a scrabble board.

For the fourth, and perhaps most important of all these rules, I must quote GKC directly, and you must bear in mind that it applies to Gype as well as detective stories:

...the fourth principle to be remembered, as in the other cases, people probably will not realize that it is practical, because the principles on which it rests sound theoretical. It rests on the fact that in the classification of the arts, mysterious murders belong to the grand and joyful company of the things called jokes. The story is a fancy; an avowedly fictitious fiction. We may say if we like that it is a very artificial form of art. I should prefer to say that it is professedly a toy, a thing that children 'pretend' wish. From this it follows that the reader, who is a simple child and therefore very wide awake, is conscious not only of the toy but of the invisible playmate who is the maker of the toy, and the author of the trick. The innocent child is very sharp and not a little suspicious.
[I gave you the ref. already.]

That is, Gype is possible only if it remains what it was founded for: a joke. There will never be a NGL (National Gype League) or offical Gype sportswear. Thank God.

Finally, GKC concludes by saying "Every good problem of this type originates in a positive notion, which is in itself a simple notion; some fact of daily life that the writer can remember and the reader can forget. But anyhow, a tale has to be founded on a truth." You can read "that the ref can remember and the player can forget" if you like - provided that the game called Gype is also founded on a truth. Which means, (pace my friend and commentor) that Gype cannot be a matter of absurdity. It belongs to the universe of reason, and hence is the only sport which is Catholic in its essence. (More on that in a future discussion.)

If you want better rules for the game, quick, go buy the Collected Works. That's all the more you'll find these days, unless someone locates GKC's and Wells' notes... But by all means, play - and if you do play, please write it up (with full details of the score, etc) and send it to us. The Chesterton University team is ready to defend its title...

What Is "Gype"?

Last week, in a gasp of desperation for something to post, I threw together a silly little puzzle about food - yes, I know I often write these things before lunch, but I have just eaten, thanks. Anyway, I happened to mention the term "gype" which apparently indicates some form of sport or recreation or game.

All Chestertonians ought to know that Gype is THE game - invented by Chesterton himself, with the able assistance of H. G. Wells. It is the only sport for which the famous Chesterton University has a varsity team. They were the national champions last year, though some people seem to think this is because they are the only school on earth which has such a team. Ahem.

But what is gype? In the OED (Oxford English Dictionary) it is stated to be a variant of "gibe" or "gipel" which means a "tunic" - but in most dictionaries all you find is "gybe" - a variant of "jibe", a nautical word meaning "to shift from side to side". (Which is a curious insight into the game, after all...) But - ah - how to explain such a complex mystery... Hmm.

Those of us who have had the privilege of laughing at the famous "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip will recall Calvin often playing "Calvin-Ball", with its splendid score of "Q to 12" , its "no song" zone, its "opposite pole" and the related "I'm very sorry song", and the unforgettable picture of Calvin lugging a bucket of ice-cold water and poetically requesting his nemesis Susie Durkins to dump it on his head, as a penalty for some infraction or other. (Ah! If only the "real" sporting events had such creativity...)

Well, perhaps that sounds very juvenile. But it strongly suggests that Calvin would be a pro at Gype.

About this very unusual game, Maisie Ward reported that GKC and H. G. Wells met at Easton and

There they played at the non-existent game of Gype and invented elaborate rules for it.
[Ward, Gilbert Keith Chesterton 376]

That is unfortunately not enough for even a Calvin to use as a rulebook. But the longest detailed discussion of the game we have fom GKC's own pen is this:

it was we who invented the well-known and widespread national game of Gype. All sorts of variations and complications were invented in connection with Gype. There was Land Gype and Water Gype. I myself cut out and coloured pieces of cardboard of mysterious and significant shapes, the instruments of Table Gype; a game for the little ones. It was even duly settled what disease threatened the over-assiduous player; he tended to suffer from Gype's Ear. My friends and I introduced allusions to the fashionable sport in our articles; Bentley successfully passed one through the Daily News and I through some other paper. Everything was in order and going forward; except the game itself, which has not yet been invented.
[GKC, Autobiography CW16:211-2]

Here is a research project for those of us who have way too much time on our hands. No! not inventing Gype; that has already been done. I mean finding these articles.

I will tell you just a little more about it, by quoting from a curious letter Dale Ahlquist received some time ago, by a man who stated how much his son enjoyed the weekend at "Chesterton University". The letter included the printed form of an e-mail letter from his son, who wrote:

Then there was this really strange game we played - I forget the name, it was something odd like jive or jike. It had a whole lot of complicated rules but it was a lot of fun. There was a board-game version and an athletic version too - they had a lot of regular equipment for a bunch of different sports, and you could pick whatever you wanted to use. It was really hilarious to watch. I took pictures. Sometimes the pitcher got tackled because he was rolling on the mound laughing. The umpires wore holsters with LOADED water pistols to administer penalties. I only got squirted twice. The board game version was also fun - after my team lost twice in a row I went in to watch. (I had to go in and see - we could hear the laughter out on the field.) Paul won one game when his queen passed GO and earned a triple word score with "syzygy" - he had three aces! I don't think he got squirted.

Speaking of e-mailsl, I have written lengthy e-mails (what else did you expect from me!) to our esteemed bloggmistress about setting up an "electronic" form of Gype which we could play over the INTERNET, but as yet we have not perfected the scheme. Every time I bring up the subject, my disk drive shoots water at me...

If you have read this far, you will understand that the mystery of Gype is perhaps even more mysterious today than it was in Chesterton's time. But it is just a smuch fun to play. Maybe at a future ChesterCon we can have a round, or inning, or whatever the unit is called... Be sure to bring your water pistol.

Chesterton in parallel / en paralelo

I thought it would be interesting to try something, just to reveal how widespread the Chesterton community is. GKC has followers from many lands, and not all of them are English speaking... so hungry indeed they are for his work that there are translations (and, I am told, good translations) of many of his works. One of the largest (if not the largest) followings is the one whose language is Spanish. Here's just a taste, treating a topic of cosmopolitan interest:

Chesterton en paralelo
De su El Hombre Común, 96-97
Traduccíon de Ana María Díaz

Seria una linda fantasía que el estilo arquitectónico del tren variara de acuerdo con el país que cruza o visita.
La Estación de Ferrocarril de Pennsylvania, en Nueva York, es una noble y seria muestra de arquitectura y, en realidad, es una especie de saludo a la gran ciudad de Filadelfia, hacia la cual están dirigidos los portales. Muy bien pudo suceder que lo que se hizo por la estación se hubiera hecho por la locomotora de vapor; y que el diseño y el color del vehículo cambiara de acuerdo con el luger hacia dónde se dirigia; a las antiguas ciudades francesas o a las llanuras de los pieles rojas; a las nieves de Alaska o a los naranjales de Florida. En realidad, me parece que hubiera habido macho más simbolismo poético, en cien formas distintas, probablemente guardado par ritos y dedicado a los dioses o santos patronos, si la locomotora de vapor hubiera sido inventada por los antiguos griegos o por los cristianos de la Edad Media y no por los filisteos de la época victoriana.

Chesterton in parallel
From his The Common Man, 110

It would be a pleasing fancy if the architectural style of the train varied according to the country it was crossing or visiting. The Pennsylvania Railway Station in New York is a noble and serious piece of architecture; and it is really a sort of salute to the great city of Philadelphia towards which its gates are set. It might quite well have fallen out that what was done for the station could be done for the steam-engine; and the very design and colour of the vehicle vary according to whether it was going to the old French cities or the Red Indian plains; to the snows of Alaska or the orange-groves of Florida. Indeed I think there would have been much poetic symbolism in a hundred forms, probably guarded by rituals and dedicated to gods or patron saints, if it had so happened that the steam-engine was discovered by ancient Greeks or medieval Christians, and not by the Philistines of the Victorian time.

Mary's Obelisk

As you know, I am filling in for our esteemed bloggmistress while she is touring Roma, the Eternal City, with her family. You may already know that Chesterton wrote a book about his visit there - it is called The Resurrection of Rome and can be found in CW21. There are a number of very interesting bits to that book - which I have no time to explore today - but there is one to which I would like to call your attention. I don't know if she has this on her itinerary, but if I ever get to Roma, it will be something I am planning on seeing...

Mary’s Obelisk

The obelisk of the Piazza del Popolo is in itself very ancient and unique, having been raised in adoration of the Egyptian Sun-God, Ra, in the time of Rameses the Third, famous as the Pharaoh who consented to the exodus of Moses and the Israelites. Being taken to Rome, it was rededicated to Apollo, the Sun-God of the Latins, if I remember right, by the Emperor Augustus. Now this also stands surmounted by a cross and in front of a Christian Church, the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo; and bearing a Latin inscription pertinent and to our purpose. I find this inscription somewhat quaintly translated, in an excellent little guide-book written for Englishmen, but I should imagine by Italians; and Italians unaware of some nuances of our national speech. “Before the sanctuary of the one, in whose womb the Sun of Justice was born under the reign of Augustus, I arise more cheerful and with more dignity.”
There is something pleasing in the thought of a hoary and primeval Egyptian monolith announcing that it rises more cheerful and with more dignity. It is as if it were all the better for a sea voyage, and had been quite bright at breakfast on the following day. But the announcement, however we translate it, is profoundly true. And it is the truth most necessary to grasp if we are to begin to understand the part played by Rome in history. It is not only a joke about being bright at breakfast; it is a very serious fact that this stone, once dedicated to two sungods, now stands in a light that is brighter than twenty suns. If the jest in any way obscures it I will try my hand here at rendering what I imagine it to mean, in parallel English phrases; it would have to read something like this: “Before her shrine of whose body was born the very Sun of Justice, in the Empire of Augustus, more joyfully and with a nobler dignity I arise.”
[GKC The Resurrection of Rome, CW21:356-357]

Some years ago I found a book called The Eternal City. It was written by Father Clement, S.D.S. in 1925, and is a collection of pictures and descriptions of Roma, published in the Jubilee Year – about four years before the Chestertons spent three months there. It is distinctly possible that it was this book to which Chesterton refers in The Resurrection of Rome, when he quotes the inscription on the obelisk in the Piazza of Santa Maria del Populo.


Above: the obelisk in the Piazza del Popolo.

The Piazza del Popolo

Our ancestors entered Rome by the Piazza del Populo. This fine spacious Piazza with its huge obelisk was “a poetical preface to Rome” for the newcomers.
This piazza has preserved its appearance unchanged since the 16th century. The three fountains which animate and decorate it date from the same period. The one on the western side shows Neptune between two Tritons. On the eastern side, the statue of Roma rests between the figures of the Tiber and the Anio, a tributary stream which rises in Subiaco and flows into the Tiber before it reaches Rome. Leo XIII ordered the middle fountain to be adorned with four lions, from whose mouths water springs forth. In the centre of the fountain rises an obelisk from Egypt 115 feet high. This obelisk once stood before the temple of the Sun-god in Heliopolis and bears the hieroglyphic inscription of King Seti-Merenptah II 1195 B.C. and of Rameses III of the 20th dynasty of the Pharaohs, 1184 B.C. It was the first Egyptian obelisk brought to Rome. With regard to the neighbouring church, “Santa Maria del Popolo,” original intended for the glorification of the Sun-god, the inscription says: – “Before the sanctuary of the one, in whose womb the Sun of Justice was born, under the reign of Augustus, I arise more cheerful and with more dignity.”
At the Porta del Popolo, the Via Flaminia ends. This was the old pilgrim route for all those coming from the North.
In the course of centuries how many of our fellow-countrymen have arrived here fatigued, but nevertheless happy to greet the end of their journey. The gate was built by Pius IV, in 1561. The inside shows an inscription by Bernini, greeting Queen Christina of Sweden when she came to Rome after her conversion.
To the right of the gate is the Church Santa Maria del Popolo, with a plain facade, erected by Meo da Caprino, a neat cupola octagonal in shape, and a bell tower. Adjoining is a convent of Augustinian Monks.
Aided by the generous contributions of the Roman people, Pope Paschal II constructed the church Santa Maria del Popolo in 1099. The name del Popolo (of the people) has been retained, owing to the cheerful participation of the people in the construction of the church.
[Father Clement, S.D.S. The Eternal City 126-128]

PS: If someone can supply a photo (or the link to a photo) of the actual Latin inscription, please let us know. Thanks.

Stop-Press Special: Dr. Overkamp passes defense!

Dateline: November 13, 2008
To: Chestertonians everywhere, humans, hobbits, elves, dwarves, wizards, and all beings of good will, real or imaginary

Text: Jennifer Overkamp, who spoke on GKC and Fairy Tales at the ChesterCon this past June, today passed her doctoral defense and is now Jennifer Overkamp, Ph.D.

May the Holy Spirit enlighten her always - in Middle Earth, Narnia, Beacon Hill or Pump Street... and in this, our real and most magical world.

Some Very Serious Stuff - and Some Laughing

If you have been following along with our exploration of Chesterton's Orthodoxy, by now you should expect the most serious and meaty matters to be interlayered with a light and crisp crust of humour. (I am sorry, but yes I am writing this before lunch again.) And this week's episode is particularly dense and chewy. We are not quite finished with the rebuttal of the all-too-modern fixation on "change" (get that pun? Hee hee!) - today we are going to see how dangerous it can be as a foundation of quicksand. And, if you are thinking that somehow this and last week's discussions are veiled commentaries on certain - er - recent political events, you may think as you like, but you can see our weekly progress through the book, and you know full well that GKC's book was written 100 years ago. But some predictions are quite natural to any serious work, like Euclid or Newton, like Aristotle or Aquinas - for the simple reason that all real (authentic, efficient, effective, productive) sciences produce discoveries. We have explored this before, not all that long ago: "scientists are proud of the complexity of science. It shows how rich it is in discoveries. If it is right at all, it is a compliment to say that it's elaborately right." [CW1:287] We have a right to be proud of Chesterton's work, because he has told us what to expect - and we are seeing it unfold. This is perhaps somewhat uncomfortable - people thought he was quite crazy when he gave warnings about what Hitler was up to. Chesterton died in 1936, and people still didn't believe him - in fact, were still calling him anti-Semitic - but his warnings went unheeded. Please note: I am not the one to explore this matter in detail, but I suspect several important papers, if not entire doctorates in history, might be found in GKC's attempt to give an early warning of the coming peril. Nor can I spend more time here on the amazing parallel to our present situation. I can give you no better tools to assist you (short of prayer and such serious weaponry as the rosary) than to help you understand what Chesterton said. You will have to do the rest.

Did I just say "Hitler"? It has become almost a standard complaint from the media that when they disagree with someone, they claim he unfairly drags in Hitler. I have not dragged in Hitler. He comes in with Darwin, as one of the chief implementors of Darwinian philosophy: "nature gets rid of what she doesn't like, so we can do the same." That, of course, is not what scientists mean when they speak about conservation of certain DNA sequences, or the repetition of parental phenotype by progeny - which is how the science of evolution works. But, as we saw recently, the word was taken out of context and mangled, just as "relativity" was mangled, when it went into other disciplines, and when it was grabbed by other kinds of philosophy.

Why does this matter, and why does GKC go into this (as we are about to see) in a book purportedly about Christianity? Because he is faced with one of the ultimate questions of life, phrased long ago in Psalm 8: "What is Man, that You are mindful of him?" To put it another way: how am I, a man, to treat other men? Do other people matter, or don't they? How am I supposed to act?

Ah. When one does not have a dogmatic reason to believe (yes, believe) that every individual man is of infinite worth - which is the Christian teaching, some other dogma (like "evolutionism" or "relativism") fills in the void, and responds "you can do as you please - because YOU are better than he is." Better because you are more evolved, or better in some relative sense (you are lighter, darker, smarter, richer, own more, read more... you know, "better"). Which will it be?

So yes, this is serious, and worth examining. And yes, there will be some laughing, though it comes in at the end. Laughter is not only the best medicine - it is also a very powerful weapon against error.

(( click here to proceed ))

You may also be wondering why this topic seems to be going on for a while. That's because it needs some careful study, since the world is complex, and appears to be even more complex the more we study it. And this reveals an important truth, as GKC proceeds to tell us:

I passed on to the next necessity of any ideal of progress. Some people (as we have said) seem to believe in an automatic and impersonal progress in the nature of things. But it is clear that no political activity can be encouraged by saying that progress is natural and inevitable; that is not a reason for being active, but rather a reason for being lazy. If we are bound to improve, we need not trouble to improve. The pure doctrine of progress is the best of all reasons for not being a progressive. But it is to none of these obvious comments that I wish primarily to call attention.

The only arresting point is this: that if we suppose improvement to be natural, it must be fairly simple. The world might conceivably be working towards one consummation, but hardly towards any particular arrangement of many qualities. To take our original simile: Nature by herself may be growing more blue; that is, a process so simple that it might be impersonal. But Nature cannot be making a careful picture made of many picked colours, unless Nature is personal. If the end of the world were mere darkness or mere light it might come as slowly and inevitably as dusk or dawn. But if the end of the world is to be a piece of elaborate and artistic chiaroscuro, then there must be design in it, either human or divine. The world, through mere time, might grow black like an old picture, or white like an old coat; but if it is turned into a particular piece of black and white art - then there is an artist.
[CW1:315-6, emphasis added]

You may get a hint from the word "design" here that there is more to explore - but not today. (You can footnote it for future reference.) Ah, an interesting tech term from art: "chiaroscuro" is the Italian for "light-dark" - it is a type of painting using only light and shade, omitting colour. This is a very strong, powerful insight, and Chesterton's own way of "baptising" the pagans. (I wonder if this is not an "Argument From Art" about the existence of God...) GKC sees Person within Nature - not Nature personified, but Person painting Nature - and he brings to this splendid insight a real sense of true art, both creative and practical. We are at one of the points where our text is running almost parallel with his 1925 masterwork, The Everlasting Man, when he considers

...the treatment of the problem of evil. It is easy enough to make a plan of life of which the background is black, as the pessimists do; and then admit a speck or two of star-dust more or less accidental, or at least in the literal sense insignificant. And it is easy enough to make another plan on white paper, as the Christian Scientists do, and explain or explain away somehow such dots or smudges as may be difficult to deny. Lastly it is easiest of all, perhaps, to say as the dualists do, that life is like a chessboard in which the two are equal; and can as truly be said to consist of white squares on a black board or of black squares on a white board. But every man feels in his heart that none of these three paper plans is like life; that none of these worlds is one in which he can live. Something tells him that the ultimate idea of a world is not bad or even neutral; staring at the sky or the grass or the truths of mathematics or even a new-laid egg, he has a vague feeling like the shadow of that saying of the great Christian philosopher, St. Thomas Aquinas, "Every existence, as such, is good." On the other hand, something else tells him that it is unmanly and debased and even diseased to minimise evil to a dot or even a blot. He realises that optimism is morbid. It is if possible even more morbid than pessimism. These vague but healthy feelings, if he followed them out, would result in the idea that evil is in some way an exception but an enormous exception; and ultimately that evil is an invasion or yet more truly a rebellion. He does not think that everything is right or that everything is wrong, or that everything is equally right and wrong. But he does think that right has a right to be right and therefore a right to be there; and wrong has no right to be wrong and therefore no right to be there. It is the prince of the world; but it is also a usurper. So he will apprehend vaguely what the vision will give to him vividly; no less than all that strange story of treason in heaven and the great desertion by which evil damaged and tried to destroy a cosmos that it could not create. It is a very strange story and its proportions and its lines and colours are as arbitrary and absolute as the artistic composition of a picture. It is a vision which we do in fact symbolise in pictures by titanic limbs and passionate tints of plumage; all that abysmal vision of falling stars and the peacock panoplies of the night. But that strange story has one small advantage over the diagrams. It is like life.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:376-7; for the Aquinas quote see Summa Contra Gentiles IIIb C107 3 or Summa Theologica I Q5 A3, Q48 A1 and Q49 A1]]

I grant you that this was rather a long excerpt, and somewhat distracting, but I think you need to ponder this black and white issue. (Am I talking about race? Yes, the human race, in part - but there's something far larger here. Remember we are dealing with thought and with reality. Don't lose the path here because we've stopped to look at things.)

And now, as we would expect, just when it seems we're getting lost in a collection of philosophical matters, GKC gives us an example:

If the distinction be not evident, I give an ordinary instance. We constantly hear a particularly cosmic creed from the modern humanitarians; I use the word humanitarian in the ordinary sense, as meaning one who upholds the claims of all creatures against those of humanity. They suggest that through the ages we have been growing more and more humane, that is to say, that one after another, groups or sections of beings, slaves, children, women, cows, or what not, have been gradually admitted to mercy or to justice. They say that we once thought it right to eat men (we didn't); but I am not here concerned with their history, which is highly unhistorical. As a fact, anthropophagy is certainly a decadent thing, not a primitive one. It is much more likely that modern men will eat human flesh out of affectation than that primitive man ever ate it out of ignorance. I am here only following the outlines of their argument, which consists in maintaining that man has been progressively more lenient, first to citizens, then to slaves, then to animals, and then (presumably) to plants. I think it wrong to sit on a man. Soon, I shall think it wrong to sit on a horse. Eventually (I suppose) I shall think it wrong to sit on a chair. That is the drive of the argument. And for this argument it can be said that it is possible to talk of it in terms of evolution or inevitable progress. A perpetual tendency to touch fewer and fewer things might - one feels, be a mere brute unconscious tendency, like that of a species to produce fewer and fewer children. This drift may be really evolutionary, because it is stupid.

If you do not know enough Greek to catch the roots, "anthropophagy" means the practice of eating humans (phage+anthropos). We heard about this last week in the "Salt" reference, but now we hear an even more distorted form - and yet, that is what is contained in the idea of "progress".

Now, if you weren't already in a state because of the mention of Hitler, you will perhaps really find GKC's next paragraph upsetting. But you need to recall that there is a vast difference between (1) the authentic science which explores how measurable traits in a parent relate to the same traits in the offspring (which is evolution, a science) and (2) the view that some people are better, higher, more evolved than others (which is evolutionism, or Darwinism, a philosophy). We cannot go into the deeper aspects of these things today, but if you are anxious to learn more, I recommend the chapter "Critic of Evolutionism" in Jaki's Chesterton a Seer of Science, available through the ACS. With that in mind, then:

Darwinism can be used to back up two mad moralities, but it cannot be used to back up a single sane one. The kinship and competition of all living creatures can be used as a reason for being insanely cruel or insanely sentimental; but not for a healthy love of animals. On the evolutionary basis you may be inhumane, or you may be absurdly humane; but you cannot be human. That you and a tiger are one may be a reason for being tender to a tiger. Or it may be a reason for being as cruel as the tiger. It is one way to train the tiger to imitate you, it is a shorter way to imitate the tiger. But in neither case does evolution tell you how to treat a tiger reasonably, that is, to admire his stripes while avoiding his claws.
[CW1:316-7]

You must wonder if Mr. Watterson, who drew the comic "Calvin and Hobbes" had read this! But note: there is a middle way. I don't recall if I gave you a link to this matter when we were dealing with the idea of exalting the extremes - remember, about liking red and white, and having a "healthy hatred of pink"? This is the same thing, but applied to a harder topic - the tiger. When Calvin first caught Hobbes in his tiger trap, he asked his father what to do - and Calvin's dad yelled, "Calvin I'm busy. Take it home and stuff it!" (the next frame shows Calvin making tuna fish sandwiches for Hobbes, hee hee.) GKC is not too busy to tell us what to do:

If you want to treat a tiger reasonably, you must go back to the garden of Eden. For the obstinate reminder continued to recur: only the supernatural has taken a sane view of Nature. The essence of all pantheism, evolutionism, and modern cosmic religion is really in this proposition: that Nature is our mother. Unfortunately, if you regard Nature as a mother, you discover that she is a step-mother. The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshippers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.
[CW1:317]

GKC mentions two pagan nature goddesses: Isis of Egypt and Cybele of Anatolia; two recent poets: William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) - and then two other poets, whom might properly be called religious. George Herbert (1593-1633) and Francis of Assisi (1181 or 1182-1226). I had a difficult time finding GKC mention George Herbert, but "There is nothing in recent literature to make anyone feel that sweeping a room is fine, as in George Herbert." [ILN Jul 24 1909CW24:364] AMBER found only eight references, though there are over two pages of quotes from Herbert in Bartlett's, and a very casual glance suggests GKC quotes some of them, as usual without attribution. As you know, GKC wrote a whole book about St. Francis (found in CW2) - and I save him for last since if you really want to grasp what GKC is saying you need to get out the excellent poem of St. Francis called "The Canticle of the Creatures". There, you will find a list ("The greatest of poems is an inventory." [CW1:267]) of various natural items - if you found it in the Bible, you would suspect you were in the Psalms (e.g. 135(136)); if you were an ancient pagan, you would think it was a list of the gods and goddesses. But no - for St. Francis calls the sun his Bro... well, read it for yourself:

Most high, all-powerful, all good, Lord!
All praise is yours, all glory, all honor
And all blessing.

To you alone, Most High, do they belong.
No mortal lips are worthy
To pronounce your name.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through all that you have made,
And first my lord Brother Sun,
Who brings the day; and light you give to us through him.

How beautiful is he, how radiant in all his splendor!
Of you, Most High, he bears the likeness.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Moon and Stars;
In the heavens you have made them, bright
And precious and fair.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brothers Wind and Air,
And fair and stormy, all the weather's moods,
By which you cherish all that you have made.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Water,
So useful, lowly, precious, and pure.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Brother Fire,
Through whom you brighten up the night.
How beautiful he is, how gay! Full of power and strength.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces
Various fruits and colored flowers and herbs.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through those who grant pardon
For love of you; through those who endure
Sickness and trial.
Happy those who endure in peace,
By you, Most High, they will be crowned.

All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
Woe to those who die in mortal sin!
Happy those She finds doing your will!
The second death can do no harm to them.

Praise and bless my Lord, and give him thanks,
And serve him with great humility.
[St. Francis of Assisi]

You didn't laugh? Or at least cheer? Why not? Brother sun? Sister earth? (NO, not "mother" earth or "father" sun.) Yes: little, dancing... to be laughed at, and admired, but never imitated. In The Everlasting Man GKC examines the issue of nature-worship as part of the first or "B.C" half of his book, and it may be worth concluding today's very tense study with a future-looking quote:

There was a real human hunger in all that element of feature and locality, that procession of deities like enormous pet animals, in that unwearied watching at certain haunted spots, in all the mazy wandering of mythology. Nature may not have the name of Isis; Isis may not be really looking for Osiris. But it is true that Nature is really looking for something; Nature is always looking for the supernatural.
[GKC The Everlasting Man CW2:261-2, emphasis added]

Food and Drink in Chesterton - a puzzle

In a recent Thursday column I lapsed into hinting at one of the writing exercises I am attempting - a consideration from the biochemical view of food, sacrifice and sacrament. It was stimulated by a very interesting line from one of Chesterton's stories. Food, of course, appears a lot in Chesterton's writing, even in his fiction, and even the idea of food, or of fatness comes up time and time again. We all know about GKC's vast size; he liked to joke about it himself:

Heard during World War I: "Mr. Chesterton, why aren't you out at the front?"
GKC: "Madam, if you go around to the side, you will see that I am."

At a lecture in the U.S.: "I'm not this big, oh, no, not at all: I'm being magnified by the microphone."

Tyring to get out of a car: "Why don't you try to get out sideways?"
GKC: "I have no sideways."

GKC (to Shaw): "To look at you there's a famine in the land."
Shaw (to GKC): "To look at you, you're the cause of it."
[all quoted from memory]

Ahem. So, I have been poking through the collection of GKC's works, watching for useful mentions of food or drink... but since I have hardly begun the work on my food book, I thought perhaps we might have some fun with food and drink here.

So we have today's puzzle. Please attempt only one per comment, and give others a chance - that means, you only get one, unless you happen to answer incorrectly. Also, you must give some sort of citation to indicate the source. I cannot promise any prizes except for the fun. It's really just a mild form of Gype, without the water pistols. OK, ready? Put your batting gloves on, or your kneepads, and here we go:


1. What does Gabriel Syme order in the restaurant where the table is "a kind of screw"?
2. What does the Professor order to drink in the teashop when he catches Syme?
3. When Syme receives his "domino" blazoned with the sun and moon, what "spanking good things" are set out for him to eat?
4. What comestibles does Humphrey Pump provide in his mobile public house?
5. What dish does Father Brown consume "with the gravest sort of enjoyment"?
6. What condiments does Father Brown use to rescue someone from a murderer?
7. What is served at Innocent Smith's picnic on the roof?
8. What provides a certain "martyr" or "Christian anchorite", the "hermit standing on his head" with his one feast in the year? (Bonus point: on what day is the feast?)
9. What food does Gabriel Gale say is "better than jewelery"?
10. The proper use of what particular comestibles does Chesterton connect with thanksgiving? No, it is NOT a turkey.


Difficult bonus question: What specific food is Petersen eating when he declares that eating "is the bricks and mortar of the Temple of the Spirit"?

A helpful guide to GKC's books I: Contents of the Collected Works

Herewith, an attempt at assisting the Chestertonians of the E-cosmos with a guide to the writing of G. K. Chesterton. This index shows the titles by their placement in the Collected Works - these volumes are available through the ACS, and are being published by Ignatius Press.

Note: Future installments of this guide will give GKC's works by book title and by chronological appearance.

Volume	Contents	Original Date
CW1	Heretics	1905
	Orthodoxy	1908
	Blatchford Controversies	1904
CW2	St. Francis of Assisi	1923
	The Everlasting Man	1925
	St. Thomas Aquinas	1933
CW3	Where All Roads Lead	1922
	The Catholic Church and Conversion	1926
	essay: Why I Am A Catholic	1926
	The Thing: Why I Am A Catholic	1929
	The Well and the Shallows	1935
	The Way of the Cross	1936
CW4	What's Wrong With the World	1910
	The Superstition of Divorce	1920
	Eugenics and Other Evils	1922
	essay: Culture and the Coming Peril	1926
	essay: Social Reform vs. Birth Control	1927
	essay: Divorce vs. Democracy	1916
CW5	The Appetite of Tyranny1	1915
	The Crimes of England	1917
	essay: Lord Kitchener	1917
	Utopia of Usurers and other essays	1917
	The End of the Armistice2	1940
	The Outline of Sanity	1926
CW6	The Napoleon of Notting Hill3	1904
	The Club of Queer Trades	1905
	The Man Who Was Thursday	1907
CW7	The Ball and the Cross	1909
	Manalive	1912
	The Flying Inn	1914
CW8	The Man Who Knew Too Much	1922
	Tales of the Long Bow	1925
	The Return of Don Quixote	1927
CW94	The Poet and the Lunatics	1929
	Four Faultless Felons	1930
	The Paradoxes of Mr. Pond	1937
CW10	Poems (part 1)
CW10b	Poems (part 2)
CW11	fragment: Dialogue between Our Lord & St. Joseph	1891
	play: The Wild Knight	1900
	play: Time's Abstract and Brief Chronicle	1904-5
	play: Magic	1913
	play: The Flying Inn	1914
	play: The Temptation of St. Anthony	1925
	play: The Turkey and the Turk	1925
	play: What You Won't	1926
	play: The Judgement of Dr. Johnson	1927
	play: The Surprise	1932
	fragment: The Ages Are Passing	undated
	essay: The Great Shawkspear Mystery	1905
	essay: Sorry, I'm Shaw	1905
	essay: On the Alleged Pessimism of Shakespeare	1905
	essay: How I Found the Superman	1908
	G. B. Shaw	1909
	essay: G.B.S versus G.K.C.	1911
	essay: A Salute to the Last Socialist	1912
	essay: The Case Against Chesterton and Replies	1916
	Do We Agree? - A Debate	1928
	essay: Shakespeare and Shaw	1928
	essay: Bernard Shaw and Breakages	1930
	essay: Bernard Shaw and America	1931
	dialog: A Duel at Dusk	1923
	essay: Second Thoughts on Shaw	1934
CW12	The Innocence of Father Brown	1911
	The Wisdom of Father Brown	1914
	story: The Donnington Affair
CW13	The Incredulity of Father Brown	1926
	The Secret of Father Brown	1927
	The Scandal of Father Brown	1935
	story: The Vampire of the Village
	story: The Mask of Midas
CW14	Various stories and fragments5
CW15	Charles Dickens	1906
	Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens	1911
	The Victorian Age In Literature	1913
CW16	Autobiography	1936
CW17	Watts	1902
	Browning	1903
	Blake	1910
	Cobbett	1925
CW18	Stevenson	1927
	Chaucer	1932
	Carlyle	1902
	Tolstoy	1904
CW194	A Handful of Authors	1953
	Varied Types6	1908
	A Miscellany of Men	1912
CW20	A Short History of England	1917
	Irish Impressions	1919
	Christendom in Dublin	1932
	The New Jerusalem	1920
CW21	What I Saw in America	1922
	The Resurrection of Rome	1930
	Sidelights	1932
CW22	GKC as M. C.	1929
CW23	The Defendant	1901
	All Things Considered	1908
	Tremendous Trifles	1909
	Alarms and Discursions	1910
CW24	The Uses of Diversity	1920
	Fancies vs. Fads	1923
	The Superstitions of the Sceptic	1925
CW25	Avowals and Denials	1934
	The Common Man	1950
	The Glass Walking Stick	1955
CW26	Lunacy and Letters	1958
	Where All Roads Lead	1961
	The Spice of Life	1964
CW27	Illustrated London News essays7	1905
	Illustrated London News	1906
	Illustrated London News	1907
CW28	Illustrated London News	1908
	Illustrated London News	1909
	Illustrated London News	1910
CW29	Illustrated London News	1911
	Illustrated London News	1912
	Illustrated London News	1913
CW30	Illustrated London News	1914
	Illustrated London News	1915
	Illustrated London News	1916
CW31	Illustrated London News	1917
	Illustrated London News	1918
	Illustrated London News	1919
CW32	Illustrated London News	1920
	Illustrated London News	1921
	Illustrated London News	1922
CW33	Illustrated London News	1923
	Illustrated London News	1924
	Illustrated London News	1925
CW34	Illustrated London News	1926
	Illustrated London News	1927
	Illustrated London News	1928
CW35	Illustrated London News	1929
	Illustrated London News	1930
	Illustrated London News	1931
CW36?4	Illustrated London News	1932
	Illustrated London News	1933
	Illustrated London News	1934
CW37?4	Illustrated London News	1935
	Illustrated London News	1936

Notes:
1. The Appetite of Tyranny in CW4 contains The Barbarism of Berlin (1914) and Letters to an Old Garibaldian (1915).
2. The End of the Armistice in CW4 was compiled from GKC's writing by F. J. Sheed.
3. The Napoleon of Notting Hill in CW6 contains GKC's own illustrations.
4. CW volumes 9, 19, 22-26 and the last two ILN essay collections (presumably 36 and 37) are not yet in print. No volumes have been allocated for the collections of Daily News, New Witness, and GK's Weekly, or of the numerous other essays which are still coming to light.
5. It should be noted that CW14 does not contain the book called The Coloured Lands, though it does contain the story of that name; there a few other items which appear in both, and some which appear elsewhere in CW. CW14 is in some ways the best, as well as the largest of the CW, and due to its size and rather haphazard collection, will be treated separately.
6. Twelve Types (1902) was reprinted as Varied Types (1903) with the addition of 8 more types (authors) including Five Types (1910) and The Simplicity of Tolstoy (1912)
7. The volumes of GKC's essays collected in CW as The Illustrated London News (abbreviated as ILN) were his weekly essays appearing in that paper under the title "Our Note-Book". Additional detail on these will appear in a future installment of our guide.

I'm leaving you temporarily in the able hands of Dr. T.

We are leaving today for Italy. I am not taking any communication devises with me due to the fact that most of them won't work over there anyway. Not without a lot of trouble, anyway.

So, no computer, cell phone, etc. Just our family, and Rome. Sounds nice.

Pray for us on our journey. I will be bringing the whole ACS with me, and praying for all of you at St. Peter's where we will be attending mass.

Meanwhile, you may enjoy some extra posts from the wonderful mind of Dr. Thursday. I know I leave you in good hands.

I'll be home November 19, and will post when I am over the jet lag. Take care, everyone!

A New Picture of the Big Guy

This is one I hadn't seen before. He really was big.

GKC cartoon via Faith Mouse

Theater of the Word's YouTube Channel

There is some hilariously funny stuff here. Put your coffee cup down before watching.

A New Minute Mystery is at Upstage

Check out the Mystery Challenge and try to solve it if you dare.