Tag Archives: G. K. Chesterton

Authors, Religion

Reasonable madmen

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Now and then, ideas converge for me, which is about the best fun I have in life. And then I feel compelled to write about them here, in the sight of my guardian angel and everybody, inviting public scorn and ignominy (I believe Ignominy is a town in Wisconsin. Good fishing, they tell me).

A while back I posted about what seemed like a breakthrough in my own mental life – by way of, of all things, a dream. I found a “place” in my brain where I could take shelter from intrusive memories. I even had an idea where that “place” was located – on the right side of the brain, just above the ear. The technique of resorting to this “place” has not proved the panacea I hoped at first, but it remains a useful trick for me in regulating my thoughts, and I still use it pretty much every day.

More recently, I discovered the psychiatrist Iaian McGilchrist, initially through the conversation with Eric Metaxas embedded above. I have not yet shelled out for any of his books, because they’re kind of pricey, but I’ve watched several more videos. So far as I can grasp his thesis, I understand it thus:

We all know that the normal human brain is bilateral. Most of my life I’ve been informed that the left brain (which controls the right side of the body) is the plodding, logical, workhorse of the mind. Meanwhile, the right brain is creative and spontaneous. Back in the sixties and seventies, the hippies were always trying to access their right brains.

McGilchrist’s thesis does not contradict these distinctions, but refines them. The left brain, he says, evolved for the purpose of concentration and task completion. It learns routines, devises systems, puts things in boxes and labels them. It’s what allows us to do things automatically. Its functions are necessary to our survival. But it considers itself very smart – smarter than it is. Its true purpose is to be the servant or “emissary” of the “master” – the right brain.

The right brain is where our real intelligence lies. The right brain makes imaginative leaps. It maintains a global awareness of its surroundings. It is creative and inventive. It’s meant to be in control.

All my life, the left brain has been associated with people like me – the orthodox, the conventional. Left brain people reduce everything to set formulas and are quick to judge. Which – I can’t deny – is not far from a description of my own nature.

But McGilchrist also directs his spotlight onto other kinds of idealogues – the leftists and fascists and communists and feminists and environmentalists, etc., etc. who’ve infested our politics and history for so many decades. They’re left-brain people too, he says, and we’re beginning to get tired of them (or so he hopes).

But here’s the point of tonight’s essay. In a recent McGilchrist video I watched, he made a comment that rang a little bell for me – he said, in so many words, “The left brain is, in fact, mad.”

I immediately recalled something G. K. Chesteron wrote in Orthodoxy:

If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by things that go with good judgment. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by clarity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.

McGilchrist is not a Christian. By his own account, he values Christianity but is unable to believe in the miracle of the Resurrection.

Yet he has managed, after a century, to catch up to Chesterton, by the empirical rather than by the theological road.

Chesterton, I imagine, was thinking with his right brain.

Non-fiction, Religion, Reviews

‘A Short History of England,’ by G.K. Chesterton

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We make the Puritans picturesque in a way they would violently repudiate, in novels and plays they would have publicly burnt. We are interested in everything about them, except the only thing in which they were interested at all…. About the Puritans we can find no great legend. We must put up as best we can with great literature.

Anyone approaching G.K. Chesterton’s A Short History of England in the hope of learning many facts is likely to be sadly disappointed. I expect Chesterton himself would have been astonished at the very expectation – in his day, anyone who bought a Chesterton book knew he’d be getting a polemic. A witty polemic that might be very illuminating – even if one disagrees with the premises – but the author assumes a fair knowledge of the dates and facts from the outset. What Chesterton offers is a fresh perspective.

In this relatively short, very superficial overview of English history, the author has two advantages in creating his provocations – first of all, he’s G.K. Chesterton, a man who forever looked at the world as if in a fun house mirror or a photographic negative; and secondly that he’s a Catholic, a perpetual outsider in a land of lapsed Protestants.

Sometimes he can be surprising – he seems to anticipate interpretations of events that were unusual at the time, but are commonplace today – such as that the Saxon invaders in Arthur’s time may have only been an aristocratic minority.

As Chesterton sees it, England went wrong at two major junctures (aside from the Reformation, something he thinks self-evident) – when Richard II lost his bid to reform the government, and when, more recently, England began to ally itself with the Germans. He is writing, of course, as World War I rages, and is comforted by the fact that England is once again allied with France, which he considers a much more fitting combination.

I do recommend A Short History of England, but only if you already know a good deal of English history. (I’ll admit a lot of the names were unfamiliar to me, too.)

Non-fiction, Reviews

‘The Defendant,’ by G. K. Chesterton

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The poor—the slaves who really stoop under the burden of life—have often been mad, scatter-brained and cruel, but never hopeless. That is a class privilege, like cigars. Their drivelling literature will always be a ‘blood and thunder’ literature, as simple as the thunder of heaven and the blood of men.

On a friend’s recommendation, I picked up the Project Gutenberg version of G. K. Chesterton’s The Defendant. (My link, of course, is to a version you’ll have to pay for. You think we’re running a charity here?) It’s pretty standard Chesterton, which is to say, eccentrically stimulating.

The book’s title, as the author himself admits in the Foreword, is awkwardly put. Chesterton does not stand in his own defense here, but in defense of various topics he has chosen for no other reason than that they’re out of fashion (or were at the time). Subjects include: “Penny Dreadful” novels, skeletons, publicity, nonsense, “ugly things,” slang, detective stories, and patriotism. It helps, in reading, to have some general idea of intellectual fashions around the turn of the 20th Century. Although Christianity is mentioned, this is not one of Chesterton’s most Christian (or Catholic) works.

The Defendant isn’t one of the most memorable books in G. K.’s ouvre, but it’s definitely worth reading. There are excellent moments:

“There is a road from the eye to the heart that does not go through the intellect. Men do not quarrel about the meaning of sunsets; they never dispute that the hawthorne says the best and wittiest thing about the spring.”

“Scripture says that one star differeth from another in glory, and the same conception applies to noses.”

Authors

Live from Worcester, it’s G. K. Chesterton

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Being somewhat busy tonight, and having no useful ideas of my own, I turn this space over to G. K. Chesterton as my guest blogger. This film is from his appearance at Holy Cross College, Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1931. His remarks will be brief, and a couple splices in the film have been patched with still photos.

Have a good weekend, my friends, and don’t go outside barefoot.

Religion

Christmas of Comfort and Fog

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Scrooge did not recognize the fog surrounding him. J. G. Duesing writes,

When Scrooge is first greeted by the caroling of “God rest ye merry, gentlemen,” he responds such that “the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to the fog.” Dickens’s fog is not dismal or dark, Chesterton says, but rather something that draws in and, in the case of Scrooge, corners. Fog “makes the world small …”

He describes how this plays to the particular comfort of Christmas and the light that has pierced the fog of the world.

Photo by Rory Björkman on Unsplash

Authors, Religion, Uncategorized

December thought

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G. K. C hesterton, National Portrait Gallery, UK

“Any one thinking of the Holy Child as born in December would mean by it exactly what we mean by it; that Christ is not merely a summer sun of the prosperous but a winter fire for the unfortunate.”

Seemed appropriate for tonight, for some reason.

Non-fiction

A Basketful of Thyme

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AP: “A new study published Friday by the Anne Frank House museum in Amsterdam says despite decades of research there is no conclusive evidence the Jewish diarist and her family were betrayed to the Netherlands’ German occupiers during the second world war, leading to their arrest and deportation.” While it’s still possible they were betrayed, it’s also possible the Nazis were investigating “illegal labor or falsified ration coupons” when the Franks were discovered.

University of Stavanger: “The works of J.R.R. Tolkien are an excellent introduction to Old English and other historic languages, according to researcher.”

TGC:  Robert Barron has produced a documentary on G. K. Chesterton. Treven Wax says, “It dives headlong into two of Chesterton’s greatest works: Orthodoxy and The Everlasting Man, the latter of which C. S. Lewis called the greatest apologetic for Christianity in English.”

Authors

“It Made Less of Narnia For Me”

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Author Neil Gaiman describes how he felt about seeing the allegory in The Chronicles of Narnia.

My upset was, I think, that it made less of Narnia for me, it made it less interesting a thing, less interesting a place. Still, the lessons of Narnia sank deep. Aslan telling the Tash worshippers that the prayers he had given to Tash were actually prayers to Him was something I believed then, and ultimately still believe.

Bookselling, Publishing, Religion

A Chest-Full of Chesterton

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Catholic Way Publishing offers a Kindle edition of The G. K. Chesterton Collection (50 books) for just two bucks.

I think this may be the greatest reading value in the history of the world.

Fiction, Reviews

The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane, by Robert E. Howard

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Far back in Kane’s gloomy eyes, a scintillant light had begun to glimmer, like a witch’s torch glinting under fathoms of cold gray ice. His blood quickened. Adventure! The lure of life-risk and battle! The thrill of breathtaking, touch-and-go drama! Not that Kane recognized his sensations as such. He sincerely considered that he voiced his real feelings when he said:
“These things be deeds of some power of evil. The lords of darkness have laid a curse upon the country. A strong man is needed to combat Satan and his might. Therefore I go, who have defied him many a time.”

After viewing the not-bad movie Solomon Kane, which I reviewed recently, I decided to see whether there were any Kane stories I’d missed. I’d read one collection before, and thought that was all there was. But in fact, I discovered, Robert E. Howard wrote a number of Solomon Kane stories, enough to fill a book of reasonable length if you include the unfinished fragments, and that is what The Savage Tales of Solomon Kane is.
The stories start in Kane’s English homeland, where he battles various dark forces, but soon Howard takes him to continental Europe and then to Africa, where he stays for the rest of the book, except for a “homecoming” poem that rounds the collection out.
As you can judge from the snippet at the top of this post, Robert E. Howard was not a writer of elegance. His prose can clunk from time to time. But I have to say that I didn’t care. The man was unmatched in his ability to paint a weird scene, draw you into it, and engage you at every level. I read the book in great chunks, with immense visceral pleasure.
One surprising fact, which I learned in the excellent biographical sketch on Howard by Rusty Burke which is appended to the book, was that Howard was a fan of G. K. Chesterton. It’s apparent, though, that it wasn’t Chesterton’s theological writings that he liked, but his poetry, especially “The Ballad of the White Horse,” which he actually quotes at the section breaks in the story “The Moon of Skulls.” Despite being identified as a Puritan, Solomon Kane doesn’t actually think about theology much. He is even willing to use (though gingerly at first) a “ju-ju stick” given to him by an African witch doctor, though Howard softens the unorthodoxy of that choice later on by identifying the stick as being both the rod of Aaron and the staff of Solomon. In short, don’t look for Christian lessons here. This is pulp fiction from the 1930s, albeit top of the line pulp fiction.
Something should probably be said about Howard’s handling of race. Solomon Kane is not hostile to the black people he encounters. In fact he often acts as their protector, flying into volcanic rage over injustices and violence visited upon them. But he is patronizing in the extreme. The author’s view seems to be that Africans are a lower evolutionary form of human being, soon destined for extinction, and that it’s the duty of superior whites to look after them.
Lots of violence. The language was pretty mild, in the style of the times. And lots less sexual suggestiveness than in the Conan stories.
I should also mention that Gary Gianni’s illustrations for this book are simply wonderful – skillful line drawings in the old style of Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. They are fully worthy of the material and add immensely to the effect of the prose.
Highly recommended, as pure entertainment.