“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”
— What’s Wrong with the World (Part I, Chapter 5, “The Unfinished Temple.”). https://www.chesterton.org/the-christian-ideal/
Tag Archives: GK Chesterton
Gilbert and Joni
I’m still making my way through In Defense of Sanity, a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton. Today’s essay is “On Being Moved,” wherein the process of moving house, and having his belongings carried away around him as he tries to write, prompts him to meditate on death, deprivation, and gratitude:
In the end the dim beneficent powers will take the cosmos to pieces all round me, as my house is being taken to pieces now. . . . I go back to my writing table; at least I do not exactly go back to it, because they have taken it away, with silent treachery, while I was meditating on death at the window.
His chair remains:
I feel strangely grateful to the noble wooden quadruped on which I sit. Who am I that the children of men should have shaped and carved for me four extra wooden legs besides the two that were given me by the gods? For it is the point of all deprivation that it sharpens the idea of value; and, perhaps, this is, after all, the reason of the riddle of death.
A perfect meditation for these times.
Or, in the words of Joni Mitchell, don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?
G.K. Chesterton on Sheltering in Place
Staying home with little to do but housework (and that, best avoided!) does have its advantages. For a while I have had sitting on my bookshelf In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton (D. Ahlquist ed., Ignatius Press 2011). Chesterton is not a quick read for me. His writing is dense and clever, and if I’m not paying careful attention, his wittiness and meaning will wash right over me without penetrating. So, now is the time to spend some time with GKC.
I didn’t have to get far in the book this afternoon before Chesterton proved his timelessness. His observations from the 1905 essay “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” could have been written this week about those of us stuck at home in our maybe-not-entirely-harmonious households:
The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.
[. . .]
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. . . . The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.
[. . .]
If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. . . . He says he is fleeing his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive.
It is “exacting” to live together in close quarters, around the clock, without coming to blows. Chesterton is riffing on what is now the old adage, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.” More:
It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside.
We are “beseiged in our cities” by a germ, if not by an army. Maybe this experience will help us grow in compassion and patience. May we all realize more than before that life is a “thing from inside.”