Thursday 6 July 2021
I also read CK Chesterton’s essay on the family as an institution. I’d dipped into it before, but read it all the way through and now have my own copy of the book to mark up. He has some funny and acute observations:
The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce varieties and uncompromising divergences of men. The reason is obvious. In large community we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 10-11
…the men of the clique live together because they have the same kind of soul, and their narrowness is a narrowness of spiritual coherence and contentment, like that which exists in hell.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 11
We make our friends. We make our enemies. But God makes our next door neighbor.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 14
This is a provocative point, and amusingly put, but two issues blunt its truth. The first is that although we can not choose our family members, or those who happen to be near us, whether by virtue of being in the same community or neighborhood, it does not follow that they represent the full variety of mankind. Commonalities of culture, language, and often class and customs, are likely to exist in families, neighborhoods and communities. The second is how much narrowness can we actually achieve by choice; it is all very well to say members of a clique all have the same kind of soul, but those who choose to associate on the basis of one similarity may not be similar in other ways.
To make a man comfortable is to make him the opposite of being sociable. Sociability, like all good things, is full of dangers, difficulties and renunciations.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 11
A nice contrast, but I’m not convinced.
He can stare at the Chinese because, for him, the Chinese are a passive thing to be stared at; if he stares at the old lady in the next garden, she becomes active. He is forced to flee, in short, from the too stimulating society of his equals — of free men, perverse, personal, deliberately different from himself. The street in Brixton is too glowing and overpowering. He has to soothe and quiet himself among tigers and vultures, camels and crocodiles.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 12
It is quite proper that a British diplomatist should seek the society of Japanese generals, if what he wants is Japanese generals. But if what he wants is people different from himself, he had much better stop at home and discuss religion with the housemaid.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 15
I like the notion that one’s equals may challenge a person in a way the he or she is unaccustomed to, and in ways that are more essential and that are more likely to ‘get under the skin. I agree, as well, that the exotic has distinct limits in what it may teach a person, and that it can as easily, and perhaps more easily, be an escape from self reflection and self analysis.
The supreme adventure is being born. There do we walk into a startling and splendid trap.
GK Chesterton, In Defense of Sanity – On Certain Modern Writers, p 17
This is quite a lovely bit; the rest of this passage is worth reading.
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Overall, I like his style as well. He is good with examples, and at playing opposites off one another, and at creating a sort of rhythm.