G.K. Chesterton: Tremendous Trifles
I remember a former boss criticizing and ultimately crushing a colleague with this scathing and unforgettable description: “He has only one idea and it is wrong.”
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936) was a versatile and enormously gifted writer. He was also a prolific writer, having published some 80 books, a dozen posthumously. The fact that he was both perceptive and productive, that he combined a discerning eye with a fertile mind, that he saw life through a prism of paradoxes, made it almost inevitable that he would become the source of a near endless array of punchy lines and pithy sayings, so many of which resonate to this day. Unlike my unfortunate and now undone colleague, Chesterton was a man of many ideas and, a century later, there is still little to fault with any of them.
Chesterton had strength of character and conviction. For a self-described ‘rollicking journalist’, he had strongly-held opinions and defended them vigorously.
Still in his 20s, he was one of the few journalists who publicly opposed the Boer War. Over the years, he held fast to his anti-war sentiments. “The only defensible war”, he wrote in his Autobiography (published in 1937), “is a war of defense”.
Chesterton was highly politicized, his politics coloured by his deep distrust of concentrated wealth and power.
On the nations’ leadership, he scathingly wrote: “Democracy means government by the uneducated. Aristocracy means government by the badly educated.” And: “When a politician is in opposition, he is an expert on the means to some end; when he is in office he is an expert on the obstacles to it.”
His take on national pride is a classic: “(Saying) ‘My country right or wrong’ is like saying ‘my mother, drunk or sober’.”
Chesterton’s gregarious manner and wry humor belied a deep troubling over the vagaries, paradoxes and inconsistencies of life. He found answers in Christianity; his books on the subject contained some of his most memorable thoughts, not always religious ones.
From his 1905 Heretics: “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” The sequel, Orthodoxy, appeared three years later and provided this gem: “Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead.”
Ultimately, the failings of other societal structures gave way to the constancy and incontrovertibility of faith. From his Introduction to the Book of Job (1907), Chesterton makes it clear that “the riddles of God are more satisfying than the solutions of man”. In Christendom in Dublin, published in 1933, he wrote: “Once abolish the God… government becomes the God.” And, finally: “When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything”.
Of course, not all his subjects were lofty; some of his targets were, frankly, of low stature. Consider these observations on thieves: “Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become theirs so that they may more perfectly respect it.” And “Misers get up early in the morning; and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before.”Anything and everything was grist for his always turning, ever-churning mill. “There is no such thing…as an uninteresting subject”, he wrote. “The only thing that can exist is an uninterested person.”
According to Charles Dickens, “trifles make the sum of life”. This has special meaning when it comes to Chesterton, whose keen eyes caught the essence of even the most mundane things. You know someone can put things in their proper perspective when he can write a book called On Running After One’s Hat, All Things Considered. Perhaps the best example of Chesterton’s ability to turn trivia into timeless truths is his wonderfully witty Tremendous Trifles, published in 1909.
From this classic and others, come the following Chesterton observations worth contemplating:
“He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.”
“Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.”
“To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it.”
“One sees great things from the valley, only small things from the peak.”
With a broad sweep from his unique vantage point, Chesterton managed to take in everything, great and small.
Beauty and the Beast
The Gargoyle has been a most pleasant surprise. A surprise because the book was given to me with little advance press, it being a galley copy made available to librarians and book sellers prior to hitting the shelves. A surprise because this is a first time author and a Canadian one, to boot. Mostly, it is a surprise because, for all intents and purposes, it is a love story that men can enjoy right out there in full view. You don’t have to worry about being drummed out of the union because you’ve been caught at a matinee of He’s Just Not That Into You.
The Gargoyle, published by Doubleday, is the first effort by Andrew Davidson. And it is an extraordinary one. This is a book that successfully slips and slides between realities and magically transcends time. Of course, it is the acceptance of time as non-linear that enables you to define what is and what is not reality.
In other words, if you can suspend disbelief, as the principal character does when Marianne Engel, a beguiling schizophrenic, transports him to a past they supposedly shared together, you will be open to the paradoxes and parallels that run throughout.
In their previous, fourteenth century lives, he was a mercenary felled by a flaming arrow who became a stonemason. She was a novice in the Engelthal monastery; her talents for language found their fullest expression in the stifling Scriptorium. He is now the ex-porn star whose budding career was cut short by a car accident in which he was horribly burned; he becomes a writer telling of a sculptor/temptress whose madness and mastery over stone bring gargoyles to life.
“I absorb the dreams of the stone, and the gargoyles inside tell me what I need to do to free them. They reveal their faces and show me what I must take away to make them whole…It’s like I’m digging a survivor out from underneath the avalanche of time …They’ve been hibernating in the winter of the stone and the spring is in my chisel. If I can carve away the right pieces, the gargoyle comes forth like a flower out of a rocky embankment.”
Of course, she also brings him back to life, subtly but relentlessly chipping away at a cynical and contemptuous veneer.
There is always the story behind the story, the underlying message, the over-arching theme that ties a string of apparently disparate tales together. Characters, at least the main ones, are fully developed. And yet they remain inscrutable. They are hardened, yet vulnerable. They are intertwined, yet separate. They are all gargoyles.
In short, this is a book with a remarkable depth.
Parental Guidance: Unless you are into burn victim physiology and psychology, you might find the book a bit of a struggle for the first 60 pages or so. Just a warning.
Size Matters
Last time, I wrote about two-letter words. I subsequently came across this interesting entry, published back in June 2007 at Amazing Posts, which focused on words considerably longer. In fact the spotlight was on the longest words in the English language.
The longest word ever to appear in the English dictionary is pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis at 45 letters long. This disease, an inflammation of the lungs caused by the inhalation of very fine silica dust, is also known by its shorter name, silicosis.
It is easy to imagine why no one remembers the longest word in second place.
Admittedly, once you get past pneumonoceteracetera, everything else is somewhat anticlimactic. But, for those who enjoy word play, there are a number of other interesting words to pull out on an exceedingly slow night when the only other option is reading Henry James.
Everyone knows that ‘e’ is the letter that appears most often in the English language. Simply because it is there, a number of authors have taken on the challenge of writing entire novels without using the letter ‘e’. The earliest, Gadsby, was penned by Ernest Vincent Wright back in 1939. In 1995, Gilbert Adair published A Void, a translation of George Perec’s French-language mystery, La Disparition. Neither the French nor English version contains the letter ‘e’.
So, down to the bite-sized, the longest English word that does not contain the letter ‘e’ is floccinaucinihilipilification. This one, meaning “the action or habit of estimating as worthless”, weighs in at a welterweight 29 letters.
If, by the way, you think you cannot do much with words like this, you are wrong. Take out a couple of affixes, then add in a couple of new ones and you get new, wonderfully evocative words: floccinaucical (“inconsiderable, trifling”) and floccinaucity (“a matter of small consequence”). You will note that neither contains the letter ‘e’.
Not quite the same challenge, but interesting still are dermatoglyphics, misconjugatedly and uncopyrightable, each 15 letters long, tied for the longest words in which no letter appears more than once.
Aegilops is the longest word with its letters arranged in alphabetical order. Spoonfed is the longest word with its letters arranged in reverse alphabetical order.
Esophagographers, 16 letter long, is the longest word in which each of its letters occurs twice.
And so it goes. And goes and goes, with the longest word in alphabetic order, the longest palindromic word, the longest homophonic anagrams, and – to really stretch the point – the longest words that consist of only letters with ascenders, descenders and dots in lower case (lighttight and hillypilly).
Well, for now, that’s about the size of it.
Two for One
True Scrabble fans know enough legitimate two-letter words to really annoy the casual player. To even the odds ever so slightly, I will list a dozen or so twofers, with definitions.
Not surprisingly, many, like Ti, a woody plant native to the Pacific islands like Samoa and Tahiti, are not your English garden variety words but ones that emerge from the remote corners of our linguistically fertile planet. As you seed the board with these short but sweet exotica, you can show that you are both well-versed and well-traveled.
There are animals, running the full spectrum of the alphabet, from Ai, a South American three-toed sloth, to Zo, which is a Dr. Suess-like cross between a yak and a cow.
For the esoteric, Ba is the eternal spirit in Egyptian mythology. Qi (pronounced chee as in, but different than, tai chi) is the Chinese life force. Another mystical universal force is Od, sometimes manifesting itself in supernatural phenomena. (This, by the way, is not Odd, another universal force manifesting itself in the unnatural behaviour of various aunts on my mother’s side.)
Everyone knows an Em is a printer’s measure, but most don’t know that an En, also a printer’s measure, equals half an Em.
Yes, Fa is a perfume, but it’s also the fourth note in the diationic scale (do re mi fa so…) and perfectly acceptable Scrabble fare. As are Greek letters like Mu, Nu, and Xi. Xi should not be confused with Xu, a Vietnamese coin. Xu, by the way, is also the plural of Xu; you may get called on it.
Another weird one is Gu, a violin played in Shetland, an archipelago off the northeast coast of Scotland. It comes with a bonus: you can also spell it gue and gju.
It’s now time to finish off your frustrated foes. You can continue to bury them bit by bit with your Ko, a Maori digging stick, or cut directly to the chase with a Da, a Burmese knife that would make Crocodile Dundee proud.
When you’ve got dozens of two-letter words down, it’s your choice.
