{"id":1553,"date":"2003-11-10T11:49:19","date_gmt":"2003-11-10T16:49:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2003\/11\/10\/1553.html"},"modified":"2018-03-12T16:43:29","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:43:29","slug":"chesterton","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2003\/11\/10\/chesterton\/","title":{"rendered":"Chesterton"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger is reading (among other things) The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward<\/a>, © 1936) (although the in-print version appears to be from House of Stratus<\/a>). I had remembered that Chesterton<\/a> was, of course, quite mad, but I had forgotten just how well he fit in to that stuff I’m so fascinated by, England from around 1880 to 1910 or so. There’s so much going on; there are so many threads, movements, schools, and controversies. It really seems like it was an exciting time to be intellectually curious (although, I suppose, the point of being intellectually curious is that it’s always an exciting time to be intellectually curious).\n\n

Anyway, a couple of quotes from the early part. First, this line from a discussion of his time at art school in the nineties: “Mine was the time of Impressionism; and nobody dared to dream there could be such a thing as Post-Impressionism or Post-Post-Impressionism.” (p. 87) A telling point about the shortsightedness of the individual in the Age of Progress, from the Apostle of Common Sense, yes?\n

The second one, after a discussion of his experimenting with the occult as a young man:

“The progress of the preternatural has gone on spreading and strengthening though my whole life. ... When I was quite a boy [b. 1874], practically no normal person of education thought that a ghost could possibly be anything but a turnip-ghost; a thing believed in by nobody but the village idiot. When I was a young man, practically every person with a large circle had one or two friends with a fancy for what would still have been called mediums and moonshine. When I was middle-aged, great men of science of the first rank like Sir William Crookes and Sir Oliver Lodge claimed to have studied spirits as they might have studied spiders, and discovered ectoplasm as they discovered protoplasm. At the time I write [1936], the thing has grown to a considerable religious movement ...” (pp. 80-81)<\/blockquote> Fifty years or so have given him the impression of seeing the direction of things, when in fact he is in the same position as the art school students, mired in their own perceptions of the universe, believing that their vision is more complete than it is, and that the future is predictable from the arc of the past. Spiritualism as a movement didn't last ten years beyond his death, and although we are not back at the turnip-ghost stage, we are, I think, at the mediums and moonshine phase. Which is not to say we're headed back, or forward, or sideways, or any other way; it's just to say that the future is not what it looks like; it's more complicated than that (thank the Lord).\n\n

I’m enjoying the book immensely, tho’ I can’t say I’ve found much I agree with him about. I’ve never trusted Common Sense, and I must admit that his views on what he calls the Jewish Problem make it difficult for me to like him. Still, he writes well, and he was in the middle of things, in a time when things had a juicy center.\n\n

Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Your Humble Blogger is reading (among other things) The Autobiography of G. K. Chesterton (New York: Sheed & Ward, © 1936) (although the in-print version appears to be from House of Stratus). I had remembered that Chesterton was, of course,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1553"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16863,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1553\/revisions\/16863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}