Thursday, 6 October 2022

* Part 4 of the Essays Project: A course of reading conducted with Charles Taliaferro. Note that these are my particular favorites and views, not CT’s, though no doubt some are influenced by him.

This entry contains thoughts on five essays by Chesterton:

A Defense of Rash Vows
A Piece of Chalk
On Lying in Bed
Dreams
On the Thrills of Boredom

Contents

A Defense of Rash Vows, G. K. Chesterton (abridged, from The Defendant)

I have difficulty with this article. But I will begin with what I like:

The man who makes a vow makes an appointment with himself at some distant place and time. The danger of it is that himself should not keep the appointment. And in modern times this terror of oneself, of the weakness and mutability of one’s self, has perilously increased and is the basis of the objection to vows of any kind.

I like this notion of the vow, that one will make it and keep to it regardless of the trials it entails. There seems value in that sort of self-discipline, at least in certain cases.

I don’t buy his wholesale dismissal of “mutability” in people’s courses of action, nor his attribution of that to “weakness.” That may indeed, sometimes, be the case, but it might also be the case that as one learns more, one sees a better a course of action, a more effective way of achieving higher objectives. Should one never change one’s mind? Is that really a virtue? Is retreat bad in every case? Does not the course of action, and its goal, make a difference?

This takes us to the issue of “rash vows.” The vows he describes, whether imagined in modern circumstances, or taken from history, all seem senseless and trivial. Counting all the leaves on trees on a street, or chaining mountains together, benefits no one. I fail to see the virtue in doing such things; and that they are done as a consequence of a momentary impulse is no saving grace. Rather, that a momentary impulse should entail a great effort that benefits no one and no thing seems to serve only as a monument to the vow-takers ego; it enshrines a bizare impulse as god.

If it were the case that the vow were meaningful – say, the sight of a starving child driving someone to start an organization to remedy the problem – that would be admirable. But I still fail to see that attraction of making a decision on an impulse. Would it not be more admirable if one made a considered vow, having thought through the difficulties and challenges one would face, and then proceeded anyway?

The essay ends with quite a wonderful passage:

There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur, and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the aesthetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing. It must have satisfied even the giant hunger of the soul of a lover or a poet to know that in consequence of some one instant of decision that strange chain would hang for centuries in the Alps among the silences of stars and snows. All around us is the city of small sins, abounding in backways and retreats, but surely, sooner or later, the towering flame will rise from the harbour announcing that the reign of the cowards is over and a man is burning his ships.
G. K. Chesterton, In Defense of Rash Vows, circa, 190x

However, I’m not convinced. Surely the image of burning one’s ships is a striking one, but does that not signify, on the general’s part, a lack of confidence in his own self discipline? Rather than making an appointment with one’s self in the future, one is foreclosing the need for any appointment, transmuting the requirement for commitment and self-discipline into action driven by desperation and lack of alternatives. One might argue that the leader possesses plenty of resolve, and that he is concerned only about those he leads; but still, is that not depriving them of the opportunity to show their unwavering loyalty and commitment?

In any case, while I have sympathy for the notion of commitment and self-discipline, and agree with the objection to people who will not commit to anything and who always have a path of retreat in mind, the exultation of rashness seems like an exercise in egotism and nihilism.

Following a later discussion with CT, and another reading, I recognize that the burning of ships might be viewed primarily as a message sent to others in light of one’s confidence in the commitment of the others’ to the course of action, rather than a lack of confidence…

A Piece of Chalk, G. K. Chesterton, 1905

A pleasant read. Brown paper to drawn on, pieces of chalk, the landscape of southern England, drawings of devils and seraphime and gods and the soul of a cow. Inspiration in like sunbeams, and out like Apollo. The lack of white chalk, and the meaning of white: as a color, as a symbol of presence rather than absence.

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell.

He returns (if indeed this was written after “…Rash Vows,”) to the theme of modern society as being filled with people who are non-committal.

The essay ends with him lamenting that he has forgotten to bring white chalk, and how, as a consequence, his “absurd little pictures would have been as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it.” But then, roaring with laugher, “so that the cows stared at me and called a committee,” he realizes that southern England is nothing but chalk, and he can break off a piece and do his drawings.

On Lying in Bed, G. K. Chesterton, circa 190x

Lying in bed, he imagines it would be nice to have a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. He imagines other ways of achieving this, and their drawbacks. He notes the scarcity of blank white space in the modern home. “I could not imagine why one arbitrary symbol […] should be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort of smallpox.”

He turns to modern morals:

If there is one thing worse than the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus it is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than bad morals.”
– G. K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed, circa 190x

It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms grow more fixed while its spirt grows more fickle.
– G. K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed, circa 190x

Chesterton is very good at the juxtaposition of opposites: weakening of major morals/strengthening of minor morals; its mechanisms grow more fixed white its spirt grows more fickle. No doubt there is a term in classical rhetoric for this.

This alarming growth of good habits really means a too great emphasis on those virtues which mere custom can ensure, it means too little emphasis on those virtues which custom can never quite ensure, sudden and splendid virtues of inspired pity or of inspired candor. […] Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected.
– G. K. Chesterton, On Lying in Bed, circa 190x

Dreams, G. K. Chesterton, 1901

He begins by complaining that dreams, in literature, are unrealistic in that they have a clear narrative and moral. Instead, he argues that they have a chaotic and even contradictory character. At first sight they seem like the opponent of art, in that they turn the order of everyday life into the discordant and inscrutable confusion.

Dreams have a kind of hellish ingenuity and energy in the pursuit of the inappropriate; […] finding exactly the word that is wrong, and exactly the action that is meaningless. […] The object of a dream appears to be to so develop itself that some futile and utterly half-witted detail shall gradually devour all the other details of the vision.
– G. K. Chesterton, Dreams, circa 190x

I think this is a very apt characterization of dreams. And, his attempt to identify the “unity” in dreams is very interesting, although I am not convinced that it is so.

There is one unity which we do find in dreams. It binds together their brutal inconsequence and all their moonstruck anti-climaxes. It makes the unimaginable nocturnal farce which begins with a saint choosing parasols and ends with a policeman shelling peas, as rounded and single a harmonv as some poet’s roundel upon a passion flower. This unity is the absolute unity of emotion.
[…]
Our dream may begin with the end of the world, and end with a picnic at Hampton Court, but the same rich and nameless mood will be expressed by the falling stars and by the crumbling sandwiches.
– G. K. Chesterton, Dreams, circa 190x

CT notes that GKC may have been reacting against the rise of the psychoanalytic approach to dreams, which treats them as vehicles for meaning. But in the essay, he only points to the unrealistic depictions of dreams in fiction and narrative.

On the Thrills of Boredom, G. K. Chesterton, circa 190x

This seems quite timely to me, if one replaces the “riot of dances, plays or entertainments,” with ‘the overly structured hyper-scheduled extracurricular activities’ of today’s students. I certainly agree with the gist of it, which is that there is an attempt to fill the life of young people with activities, so that they never have to face the trial of being bored, or having nothing to do.

However, to me, Chesterton seems to miss the mark in his emphasis of boredom – perhaps he has been seduced by the love of paradox evinced in his title. Rather, it seems to me that the issue is where one finds… entertainment, stimulation, conversation… where one finds material that engages one’s imagination, and that it is a good skill, and an important one to cultivate, that one must find a certain proportion of that entertainment within oneself, that one is able to spin the gold of engagement out of the flax of the mundane.

Chesterton also, in his examples, evokes happenstance: that one is stranded in dry waiting rooms, or imprisioned, or in enforced retirement to a forgotten tea room – I am not sure if I find this innately important. I do agree that it is important to be able to find interest wherever one finds oneself; if there is more to it, some virtue added by involuntary nature of one’s circumstances, I don’t see that.

But, in the large, I agree.