“The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.” [1925]
~~G. K. Chesterton
Posted on 05/29/2011 4:57:40 PM PDT by Salvation
I think I’d add Joe Sobran, RIP, to the essayists. But we’re really not on a level field here. Separating writers from thinkers isn’t an easy task. Chesterton just happened to be at least one of the best of both.
You find fellow fans in some of the oddest places.
So true! One of my sons forced me to read Koontz several years (decades?) ago. He may not sell as well as King, but he’s consistently moral and spiritual in the most orthodox sense. I never read a Koontz dedication to GKC, but I’m not surprised. Btw, another fairly well known chldren’s author named two of his heroes (animals, I think one was a cat, the other a rabbit) after him; but for the life of me, I can’t remember the book!
at 10? you must have been quite a young intellectual! I didn’t read him until my 20s and missed a lot. I think he would have been a scarily brilliant person to have a chat with.
One additional note here. The two-page biography of Charles Dickens in the famed 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was written by GKC.
Pelham Grenville, aka Plum is revered more in India than in the UK.
his working of the words are incredible -- "they were instrumental in moving the hitherto unformulated dissatisfactions from the subconscious to the conscious mind."
I discovered the world of ideas in second grade when, lacking anything better to do, I started reading my brothers seventh and eighth grade text books.
Scary brilliant people are the best kind to chat with. They can make your brain stretch until it hurts!
Without question, “Something New” (a novel). It’s been renamed since it came out but is still offered under the original title. Published in 1915, it may be the first of the Blandings Castle stories. Lord Emsworth, the Hon. Freddie, among many others. Talk about screwball comedy and a flawless plot. He just can’t be topped.
Short story: “Uncle Fred Flits By”
Wodehouse Playhouse and Jeeves & Wooster never came close to doing him justice. He’s far better in print.
yes, sigh... and Freerepublic USED to be like this, where you could have a sensible discussion or even an knock-down argument but a sensible one. What happened? When did we get the crazies? sigh...
Actually, I've never seen the "Jeeves and Wooster" TV series
I think it would be impossible to do justice to Gussie Fink-Nottle's performance at Market Blanding's school house -- oh, the pictures I framed in my mind when reading that!
Like HTB, I was a very bored 9 year old when I first started reading him -- my mum had a big collection. and from the first reading I was hooked -- out went the hardy boys and in came the marvellous idyllic world of wodehouse.
And I think I've been highly influenced by this too!
And what did he argue for? What was it he defended? He defended "the common man" and common sense. He defended the poor. He defended the family. He defended beauty. And he defended Christianity and the Catholic Faith.
So why should we wonder why the 20's century "educators" ensured we would not hear of this guy?
**“One of the paradoxes of this age is that it is the age of Pacifism, but not the age of peace.” –G. K. Chesterton.**
That’s a good one with a lot of meaning packed into a few words!
These two wrote well on the narrow subject that was their profession. I don't think they rise to the level of defending God, Justice and Beauty against the 20'th century vandalism.
You’d like the Jeeves & Wooster series. Like the really good Brit TV, it beat anything we were producing.
We, my brothers & sisters & I, heard rather than read our earliest Wodehouse selections. My father sat opposite five or six of us, tears rolling down his cheeks as he shook from laughter at what he was reading. He got the same way when he read us parts of Dickens. All nine of us children, to this day, still reread and read both authors aloud to our own kids.
You are now on the GKC ping list!
Well, I like all the Bertie Wooster and Jeeves works the best because those were the first that I read. Even though I’m familiar with them, they’re still a pleasure to read again and again because a. the language is SO good, and b. like a good comedy, it’s fun to watch how it happens.
Salvation:
Chesterton was also involved in the defense of life and a critic of the “eugenics movement” that started in England in the late 19th/early 20th century, which of course led to population control via abortion, euthansia, etc. One of my favorite quotes with respect to population control types [usually abortion supporters] is Chesterton’s quote from an Introduction to Dicken’s “A Christmas Carol” where he wrote:
“The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.” [1925]
“The answer to anyone who talks about the surplus population is to ask him, whether he is part of the surplus population; or if not, how he knows he is not.” [1925]
~~G. K. Chesterton
Yes, indeed—he was antisocialist, antipositivist, antiprogressivist, anticommunist. Not perhaps one of his major accomplishments, except in the eyes of Dickens lovers, was his successful denial of any progressive claim to Dickens’ social philosophy. He wrote that G. B. Shaw (despite his great admiration for CD and years of attempting to “sanitize” him for modern readers) never forgave Dickens for not succumbing to socialist panaceas. “A Christmas Carol” is but one Dickensian work that calls for private, not public, charity—the Christian solution.
I'd suggest Orthodoxy as the first to get to, and the one most likely to take you all through the rest.
Orthodoxy is a good introduction (I think) to the way GKC thinks,an amazing (one is tempted to say "universal") assemblage of various common-sense experiences and desires of all right-thinking humans, founding its observations not so much (at first) on theology or philosophy as on fairy tales, finding in them universal (and very practical and admirable) desires for the Good, the Just and the Heroic, which almost all of us feel as children, before the various ideologies we are made subject to throughout the process cruelly called our "education" weasels and shames them out of us, and we are set adrift in a dark world where we are cut off from not only the wisdom of our faith, but that of our ancestors and even our own experiences, and schooled to believe things that do good neither to us nor to our masters (though they will tell us, often enough, that it is all for our own good). Orthodoxy is the declaration of independence for the mind that would be free to perceive reality.
That book gives you a general overview of the terrain of Planet Chesterton. If you want to get into sorts of adventures available there, I'd suggest either Manalive or (my personal recommendation) The Man Who Was Thursday. The former might (inaccurately, but what are you gonna do?) be described as a kind of social farce or (better, if used in the Aristotelian or Dantean sense) a comedy, but Thursday is a free-wheeling, extravagant and bizarre chase that is partly an espionage and detective thriller, and partly an absurdist-seeming farce (though it has nothing at all to do with absurdism--in fact, quite the opposite: it has everything to do with Sense!) And don't wait for the movie version because (please God) there will never be one. At the heart of the book is an Outlook and Attitude (I'm not completely sure that it can be called a "philosophy," though what there is of one may be found, if anywhere, in Orthodoxy) that would give most film-makers hives--and there is no director smart enough to make the movie, or even to understand the book without changing his life and career entirely--though, oddly, Orson Welles adapted it for his radio series The Mercury Theatre On The Air, the episode being available commercially and also (I believe) through legal and free download from various sites on the web (I bought mine on audiocassette before I realized this)--and I have to say it's not bad, though largely because, like the book, it's mostly a verbal experience. I have no idea how it would work as a film, unless it were a critically-opaque mixture of genres, up to and including animation, to make it work.
Once you've got through these two works, you are free to the Chestertonian universe--though probably never completely stable on your feet: Chestertonia is earthquake country, and even the most seasoned traveler there is likely to be knocked off his feet from time to time, or have the country suddenly whip around under his feet and to find himself facing in an unexpected direction. It will be outlandish and challenging.
And best of all, it will be Home--the place where you were always meant to live--not the drab, shallow, meaningless and truly absurd and wholly artificial low-level theme park that our so-called thinkers and social-engineering types have spent their lives (and yours) convincing you that you ought to be content with. It is the world humans were meant for.
Get there as fast as your legs will carry you.
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