Posted on 05/29/2011 4:57:40 PM PDT by Salvation
Chesterton's Birthday is 5/29.
FReeper Joe 6-pack's Birthday is 5/30.
Clint Eastwood's is 5/31.
:-)
How about sixes?
I’d rather do sevens.
Twelves anyone?
17’s.
G. K. CHESTERTON PING LIST
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Feh. He's in the top five or ten.
Others include:
Albert Einstein.
Dick Feynman.
Hilaire Belloc.
P. G. Wodehouse.
Dorothy L. Sayers.
C. S. Lewis.
J.R.R. Tolkien.
Up and comers for the new millenium:
Mark Steyn.
Iowahawk.
Cheers!
First, a warning.
Chesterton is NOT to be undertaken lightly.
He is an acquired taste: his writing has much more substance, more meat, to it, than most others, and particularly more so than the "intellectuals" of our day. But he does it (as did Dick Feynman) by writing as CLEARLY as possible, seeking to elucidate, not to impress: and to do so by example, not erudition.
Think of him as a Roman Catholic Rush Limbaugh, only writing in a time when 8th graders in Kansas had to pass tests that today's college graduates would fail.
He wrote in a number of genres and for different audiences, so it is difficult to assign a best.
So I'll go by category. Hypertext links to the works if I could find a free copy online readily:
Christian Apologetics
1) Orthodoxy
2) The Everlasting Man
Novels / Victorian Fantasy
3) The Napoleon of Notting Hill
4) The Ball and The Cross (one word: perdinavititis!)
5) The Man Who Was Thursday
6) The Flying Inn (TOPICAL 100 YEARS LATER. TO SAY MORE WOULD BE TO SPOIL IT.)
Short Stories
7) The Father Brown Mysteries or the Mr. Pond stories -- (Try When Doctors Agree or The Three Horsemen of Apocalypse or The Eye of Apollo
Memorable quote from Three Horseemen:
"Grock said no prayer and uttered no pity; but in some dark way his mind was moved, as even the dark and mighty swamp will sometimes move like a living thing; and as such men will, when feeling for the first time faintly on their defence before they know not what, he tried to formulate his only faith and confront it with the stark universe and the staring moon.
'After and before the deed the German Will is the same. It cannot be broken by changes and by time, like that of those others who repent. It stands outside time like a thing of stone, looking forward and backward with the same face.' "
Memorable quote:
Basil smiled at me. "You didn't know," he said, "that I had a practical brother. This is Rupert Grant, Esquire, who can and does all there is to be done. Just as I was a failure at one thing, he is a success at everything. I remember him as a journalist, a house-agent, a naturalist, an inventor, a publisher, a schoolmaster, a—what are you now, Rupert?"
Collected Essays
Memorable quote:
"A man offered me a newspaper or something that I had dropped. I can distinctly remember consigning the paper to a state of irremediable spiritual ruin. I am very sorry for this now, and I apologise both to the man and to the paper."
10) The Illustrated London News
For these (and others!) click here.
Cheers!
One of my favorites is “The Flying Inn”, which I need to reread if I can find a copy. I also liked “Four Faultless Felons”. And you can’t go wrong with the Father Brown stories.
Salvation, many thanks for your original post. I hope more people will enjoy Chesterton’s writing as a result.
“P. G. Wodehouse.”
Absolutely. My two favourites are Jack Vance (heavily influenced by Wodehouse) and Gene Wolfe (heavily influenced by Chesterton).
Freegards
I would add Thomas aKempis and his Imitation of Christ to your list.
Some two or three years ago I was asked in the United States to broadcast a few words on my own trade of writing -- what I thought of it and why I disliked it.
I understand that this broadcast was heard by a very large number -- some millions it seems. Now in the course of this broadcast I gave as the best writer of English now alive, Mr. P.G. Wodehouse.
...and (more telling) which ended:
I have just said that those of whom Jeeves is the prototype or the god are perhaps doomed, and this leads me to the last question which one always asks of all first-rate writing: will Mr. Wodehouse's work endure?
Pray note that literary work does not necessarily endure through its excellence. What is called "immortality" (whereas nothing mortal is immortal) is conferred upon a man's writing by external circumstances as much as by external worth. I can show you whole societies of men for whom Keats would be meaningless and I know dozens of Englishmen well versed in the French language who find Racine merely dull. Whether the now famous P.G. Wodehouse will remain upon that level for as many generations as he deserves, depends, alas, upon what happens to England. For my part I would like to make it a test of that very thing -- "What happens to England."
If in, say, 50 years Jeeves and any other of that great company -- but in particular Jeeves -- shall have faded, then what we have called England will no longer be.
Further affiant sayeth not.
Cheers!
It’s a really tiny book that can be kept on your bedstand for one section each night.
Or you can read it here http://www.freerepublic.com/~salvation/
“Chesterton debated many of the celebrated intellectuals of his time: George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Clarence Darrow. According to contemporary accounts, Chesterton usually emerged as the winner of these contests, however, the world has immortalized his opponents and forgotten Chesterton, and now we hear only one side of the argument, and we are enduring the legacies of socialism, relativism, materialism, and skepticism.”
Chesterton warned us about the Fabians. If he’d become a member he’d be a Nobel Prize Winner today.
Happy Birthday Chesterton and a big thankyou. RIP.
Thanks Salvation for the great thread.
You’re so welcome. Great writer, that Chesterton guy.
Awesome. If you dig Wodehousian manners comedy and dialogue, and also dig classic sci-fi, check out Vance.
Here’s a general write-up:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/19/magazine/19Vance-t.html
Freegards
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