 On Lying in Bed. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. On Lying in Bed by G.K. Chesterton. Lying in Bed would be an altogether perfect and supreme experience if only one had a colored pencil long enough to draw on the ceiling. This, however, is not generally a part of the domestic apparatus on the premises. I think myself the thing might be managed with several pales of Aspenol in a broom. Only if one worked in a really sweeping and masterly way and laid on the color in great washes, it might drip down again on one's face and floods of rich and mingled color like some strange fairy rain. And that would have its disadvantages. I'm afraid it would be necessary to stick to black and white in this form of artistic composition. To that purpose, indeed, the white ceiling would be of the greatest possible use. In fact, it's the only use I can think of a white ceiling being put to. But for the beautiful experiment of lying in bed, I might never have discovered it. For years, I have been looking for some blank spaces in a modern house to draw on. Paper is much too small for any really allegorical design. As Cyrano de Bergerac says, you move faux-déjeune. But when I tried to find these fine clear spaces in the modern rooms, such as we all live in, I was continually disappointed. I found an endless pattern and complication of small objects hung like a curtain of fine links between me and my desire. I examined the wall. I found them, to my surprise, to be already covered with wallpaper. And I found the wallpaper to be already covered with uninteresting images, all bearing a ridiculous resemblance to each other. I cannot understand why one arbitrary symbol, a symbol apparently entirely devoid of any religious or philosophical significance, should thus be sprinkled all over my nice walls like a sort of smallpox. The Bible must be referring to wallpapers, I think, when it says, use not vain repetitions, as the Gentiles do. I found the turkey carpet of massive unmeaning colors, rather like the Turkish Empire, or like the sweet meat called Turkish Delight. I do not exactly know what Turkish Delight really is, but I suspect it is Macedonian massacres. Everywhere that I went forlornly, with my pencil or my paintbrush, I found that others had unaccountably been before me, spoiling the walls, the curtains, and the furniture with their childish and barbaric designs. Nowhere did I find a really clear space for sketching, until this occasion, when I prolonged beyond the proper limit, the process of lying on my back in bed. Then the light of that white heaven broke upon my vision, that breath of mere white, which is indeed almost the definition of paradise, since it means purity and also means freedom. But alas, like all heavens, now that it is seen is found to be unattainable. It looks more austere and more distant than the blue sky outside the window. For my proposal to paint on it with the bristly end of a broom has been discouraged, never mind by whom, by a person debarred from all political rights, and even my minor proposal to put the other end of the broom into the kitchen fire and turn it to charcoal has not been conceded. Yet I am certain that it was from persons in my position that all the original inspiration came for covering the ceilings of palaces and cathedrals with a riot of fallen angels or victorious gods. I am sure that it was only because Michelangelo was engaged in the ancient and honorable occupation of lying in bed that he ever realized how the roof of the Sistine Chapel might be made into an awful imitation of a divine drama that could only be acted in the heavens. The tone now commonly taken toward the practice of lying in bed is hypocritical and unhealthy. Of all the marks of modernity that seem to mean a kind of decadence, there's nothing more menacing and dangerous that the exaltation of very small and secondary matters of conduct at the expense of very great and primary ones, at the expense of eternal ties and tragic human morality. If there is one thing worse that the modern weakening of major morals, it is the modern strengthening of minor morals. Thus is considered more withering to accuse a man of bad taste than of bad ethics. Cleanliness is not next to godliness nowadays, for cleanliness is made essential in godliness as regarded as an offense. A playwright can attack the institution of marriage so long as he does not misrepresent the manners of society, and I have met Ibsenite pessimists who thought it wrong to take beer but right to take prosic acid. Especially this is so in matters of hygiene. Notably such matters as lying in bed. Instead of being regarded as it ought to be, as a matter of personal convenience and adjustment, it has come to be regarded by many as if it were a part of essential morals to get up early in the morning. It is upon the whole part of practical wisdom, but there is nothing good about it or bad about its opposite. Meisers get up early in the morning, and burglars, I am informed, get up the night before. It is the great peril of our society that all its mechanisms may grow more fixed while its spirit grows more fickle. A man's minor actions and arrangements ought to be free, flexible, creative. The things that should be unchangeable are his principles, his ideals, but with us the reverse is true. Our views change constantly, but our lunch does not change. Now, I should like men to have strong and rooted conceptions, but as for their lunch, let them have it sometimes in the garden, sometimes in bed, sometimes on the roof, sometimes on the top of a tree. Let them argue from the same first principles, but let them do it in a bed, or boat, or a balloon. 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. If ever that abrupt appeal is made to us, we may fail. A man can get used to getting up at five o'clock in the morning. A man can not very well get used to being burnt for his opinions. The first experiment is commonly fatal. Let us pay a little more attention to these possibilities of the heroic and unexpected. I dare say that when I get out of this bed, I shall do some deed of an almost terrible virtue. For those who study the great art of lying in bed, there is one emphatic caution to be added. Even for those who can do their work in bed, like journalists, still more for those whose work cannot be done in bed, as for example the professional harpooners of Wales, it is obvious that the indulgence must be very occasional. But that is not the caution I mean. The caution is this. If you do lie in bed, be sure you do it without any reason or justification at all. I do not speak, of course, of the seriously sick. But if a healthy man lies in bed, let him do it without a rag of excuse. Then he will get up a healthy man. If he does it for some secondary hygienic reason, if he has some scientific explanation, he may get up a hypochondriac. End of On Lying in Bed by G. K. Chesterton. Recording by Vincent Tory. A piece of chalk. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A piece of chalk by G. K. Chesterton. I remember one splendid morning, all blue and silver, in the summer holidays when I reluctantly tore myself away from the task of doing nothing in particular, and put on a hat of some sort, and picked up a walking stick, and put six very bright colored chalks in my pocket. I then went into the kitchen, which along with the rest of the house belonged to a very square and sensible woman in a Sussex village, and asked the owner and occupant of the kitchen if she had any brown paper. She had a great deal. In fact she had too much, and she mistook the purpose and the rationale of the existence of brown paper. She seemed to have an idea that if a person wanted brown paper, he must be wanting to tie up parcels, which was the last thing I wanted to do. Indeed it is a thing which I have found to be beyond my mental capacity. Hence she dwelt very much on the very equality of toughness and endurance in the material. I explained to her that I only wanted to draw pictures on it, and that I did not want them to endure in the least, and that from my point of view therefore it was a question, not of tough consistency, but of responsive surface, a thing comparatively irrelevant in a parcel. When she understood that I wanted to draw, she offered to overwhelm me with note paper, apparently supposing that I did my notes in correspondence on old brown paper wrappers from motives of economy. I then tried to explain the rather delicate logical shade that I not only like brown paper, but I like the quality of brownness in paper, just as I like the quality of brownness in October woods, or in beer, or in the peat streams of the North. Brown paper represents the primal twilight of the first toil of creation, and with a bright colored chalk or two, you can pick out points of fire in it, sparks of gold, and blood red, and sea green, like the first fierce stars that sprang out of the divine darkness. All this I said in an offhand way to the old woman, and I put the brown paper in my pocket along with the chocks, and possibly other things. I suppose everyone must have reflected how primeval and how poetical are the things that one carries in one's pocket. The pocket knife, for instance, the type of all human tools, is the infant of the sword. Once I planned to write a book of poems entirely about the things in my pockets, but I found it was too long, and the age of great epics has passed. With my stick, my knife, my chocks, and my brown paper, I went out on the great downs. I crawled across those colossal contours that express the best quality of England, because they are at the same time soft and strong. The smoothness of them has the same meaning as the smoothness of great cart horses, or the smoothness of the beech tree. It declares in the teeth of our timid and cruel theories that the mighty are merciful. As my eye swept the landscape, the landscape was as kindly as any of its cottages, but for power it was like an earthquake. The villages in the immense valley were safe one could see for centuries, yet the lifting of the whole land was like the lifting of one enormous wave to wash them all away. I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not for heaven's sake imagine I was going to sketch from nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worship before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colors on brown drawing paper. They are much better worth drawing than nature. Also, they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in a field next to me, a mere artist may have drawn it, but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds, so I drew the soul of the cow, which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight, and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns, and the mystery that belongs to all beasts. But though I could not with a crayon get the best out of the landscape, it does not follow that the landscape was not getting the best out of me. And this, I think, is the mistake that people make about old poets who live before Wordsworth, and were supposed to not to care very much about nature, because they did not describe it much. They preferred writing about great men to writing about great hills, and they sat on the great hills to write about it. They gave out much less about nature, but they drank it in, perhaps much more. They painted the white robes of their holy virgins with the blinding snow, at which they had stared all day. They blazoned the shields of their paladins with the purple and gold of many heraldic sunsets. The greenness of a thousand green leaves clustered into the live green figure of Robin Hood. The blueness of a score of forgotten skies became the blue robes of the virgin. The inspiration went in like sunbeams and came out like Apollo. But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now those who are acquainted with philosophy, nay, religion, which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here on the moral significance. One of the wise and awful trues which is brown paper art reveals is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color. It is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red hot, it draws roses. When it grows white hot, it draws stars. And one of the two or three defiant verities of the best religious morality, of real Christianity, for example, is exactly the same thing. The chief assertion of religious morality is that white is a color. Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers. Virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like paint or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean being not cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment. It means a plain and positive thing, like the sun, which one either has seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong. It means something flaming, like Joan of Arc. In a word, God paints in many colors, but he never paints so gorgeously. I had almost said so godly as when he paints in white. In a sense, our age has realized this fact and expressed it in our sullen costume. For, if it were really true that white was a blank and colorless thing, negative and noncommittal, then white would have been used instead of black and gray for the funeral of this pessimistic period. We should see city gentlemen in frock coats of spotless silver linen with top hats as white as wonderful Arum Lilies, which is not the case. Meanwhile, I could not find my chalk. I sat on the hill in a sort of despair. There was no town nearer than Chichester, in which it was even remotely probable that there would be such a thing as an artist's color man. And yet, without white, my absurd little pictures would have been as pointless as the world would be if there were no good people in it. I stared stupidly round, racking my brain for expedience. Then I suddenly stood and roared with laughter, again and again, so that the cows stared at me and called a committee. Imagine a man in the Sahara regretting that he had no sand for his hourglass. Imagine a gentleman in mid-ocean wishing that he had brought some saltwater with it with him for some chemical experiment. I was sitting in an immense warehouse of white chalk. The landscape was made entirely out of white chalk. White chalk was piled more miles until it met the sky. I stooped and broke a piece off of the rock I sat on. It did not mark so well as the shop chalks do, but it gave the effect. And I stood there in a trance of pleasure, realizing that this southern England is not only a grand peninsula and a tradition and a civilization, it is something even more admirable. It is a piece of chalk. End of A Piece of Chalk by G.K. Chesterton. Asparagus. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Bryce Albertson. Asparagus by G.K. Chesterton. At about 21 minutes past two today, I suddenly saw that asparagus is the secret of aristocracy. I was trying to put long, limp stalks into my mouth when the idea came into my head, and the stalk failed to do so. I do not refer to any merely metaphorical and superficial comparisons, which could easily be made between them. We might say that most of the organism was left dead white, merely that a little button at the top might be bright green. We might draw the moral that average aristocrats are made out much stronger than they are, and illustrate it from average asparagus. They say that any stick is good enough to beat a dog with, but did anyone ever try to beat a dog with a stick of asparagus? We might draw the moral that aristocratic traditions are made out much more popular than they really were. Norman gets mispronounced as English. In this way, three French leopards were somehow turned into British lions, and in this way also, the solemn word asparagus, which means nothing so far as I know, was turned by the populace into sparrow grass, which means two of the most picturesque things in the world. Asparagus, which I presume to have been the name of a Roman pro-consul, Marcus asparagus asculans or whatnot, never deserves such luck as to lose its origin in two things so true and common as the bold birds of the town and the green democracy of the fields. Or again, we might say of sticks of asparagus that they have often lost their heads, and we might say the same of aristocrats. Both heads have been bitten off by the guillotine before now. But to complete the parallel, we must maintain that the head of an aristocrat was the best part of him, and this is often hard to maintain. But indeed, I do not base the view upon any such fancies from phraseology. Far deeper in earth are the roots of asparagus. The one essential of an aristocracy is to be in advance of its age. That is, there must be something new known to a few. There must be a password, and it must always be a new password. Moreover, it must be, by its nature, an irrational password, for anything quite rational might rapidly be calculated even by the uninitiated. In the same way, it is essential to any social observance that involves a social distinction, that the observance should be, in this sense at least, artificial. That is, you can only know the observance as the soldier knows the password, because he has been told. The working instance best known to us of the middle classes is the old arbitrary distinction about how to eat asparagus. Now, excluding cannibalism and the habit of eating sand, about which I can offer no opinion, there is really nothing one can eat which is less fitted to be eaten with the fingers than asparagus. It is long, it is greasy, it is loose and liable to every sort of soft yet sudden catastrophe. It is always eaten with some sort of oily sauce, and its nice conduct would involve the powers of a professional juggler, confirmed with some practice in climbing the greasy pole. Most things could quite easily be eaten with one's fingers. Cold beef could quite easily be eaten with one's fingers, or simply with one's teeth. I have seldom seen a noble cheese without an impulse merely to fix my fangs in it. New potatoes could be eaten with the fingers as cleanly as Easter eggs, and whitebait might as well be shoveled into our open mouths by a whitebait machine for all the use we make of a knife and fork to dissect them. We could as easily eat fish cakes as we eat seed cake. Cold Christmas pudding is a substance with all the majesty of colored marble, far cleaner, stronger, and more coherent than any ordinary bread or biscuit yet. All these we are supposed to approach through the intervention of a little stunted sword or a stumpy trident. Only this one tiresome toppling vegetable I eat between my finger and thumb. I should be better off as a giraffe eating the top of a palm tree. It doesn't want any holding up. We will not exaggerate. Eating soup with the fingers the young students should not attempt, and sauces, custards, and even curries are no field for the manual laborer. I would not eat stew rhubarb with my fingers, or indeed with any instrument that science could devise. Even with things involving treacle, I have not a good touch. But while strictly avoiding anything like exaggeration or frivolity, I still note that the point of asparagus is that it is not the food, among other foods, especially fitted to the fingers. In other words, the principle could not have been deduced from abstract reason, or have grown out of the general instincts of men. It could not have been custom. That is why it was etiquette. The brotherhood of man is a fact which in the long run wears down all other facts. Therefore, a privilege class, if it would avoid sliding naturally back into the body of mankind, must keep up an incessant excitement about new projects, new cultures, and new prejudices, new skirts, and stockings. It must tell a new tale every day or perish, like the Lady of the Arabian Nights. Tennyson, who was too much touched with this aristocratic or snobbish futurism, wrote, lest one good custom should corrupt the world, which really means lest everybody should learn the right way of eating asparagus. And so, out of luxury and waste and weariness, the fever they call progress, came into the world. Do you tell me they don't eat asparagus with their fingers now? Do I not know that in some of the best houses they have little tongs for each person, which are charming? Have I not heard that asparagus is now lowered into the open mouth on a string, or shot into the mouth with a small gun, or eaten with the toes, or not eaten at all? No, I do not know. That is what I wish to point out. They have changed the password. End of Asparagus by G.K. Chesterton. Child Psychology and Nonsense This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Child Psychology and Nonsense by G.K. Chesterton. In this age of child psychology, nobody pays any attention to the actual psychology of the child. All that seems to matter is the psychology of the psychologist, and the particular theory or train of thought that he is maintaining against another psychologist. Most of the art and literature now magnificently manufactured for children is not even honestly meant to please children. The artist would hardly condescend to make a baby laugh if nobody else laughed, or even listened. These things are not meant to please the child. At best, they are meant to please the child-lover. At the worst, they are experiments in scientific educational method. Beautiful, wise, and witty lyrics like those of Stevenson's Child's Garden of Verses will always remain as a pure, lively fountain of pleasure for grown-up people. But the point of many of them is not only such that a child could not see it, it is such that a child ought not to be allowed to see it. The child that is not clean and neat, with lots of toys and things to eat, he is a naughty child, I'm sure, or else his dear papa is poor. No child ought to understand the appalling abyss of that afterthought. No child could understand, without being a snob, or a social reformer, or something hideous. The irony of that illusion to the inequalities and iniquities with which this wicked world has insulted the sacred dignity of fatherhood. The child who could really smile at that line would be capable of sitting down immediately to write a gissing novel, and then hanging himself on the nursery bed post. But neither Stevenson, or any Stevensonian, and I will claim to be a good Stevensonian, ever really dreamed of expecting a child to smile at the poem. It was the poet who smiled at the child, which is quite a different thing, though possibly quite as beautiful in its way. And that is the character of all this new nursery literature. It has the legitimate and even honorable object of educating the adult in the appreciation of babies. It is an excellent thing to teach men and women to take pleasure in children, but it is a totally different thing from giving children pleasure. Now, the old nursery rhymes were honestly directed to give children pleasure. Many of them have genuine elements of poetry, but they are not primarily meant to be poetry, because they are simply meant to be pleasure. In this sense, hey, diddle, diddle, is something much more than an ittle. It is a masterpiece of psychology, a classic and perfect model of education. The lilt and jingle of it is exactly the sort that a baby can feel to be a tune and can turn into a dance. The imagery of it is exactly what is wanted for the first movements of imagination when it experiments in incongruity, for it is full of familiar objects and fantastic conjunction. The child has seen a cow, and he has seen the moon, but the notion of the one jumping over the other is probably new to him, and is, in the noblest word, nonsensical. Cats and dogs and dishes and spoons are all his daily companions, and even his friends, but it gives him a sort of fresh surprise and happiness to think of their going on such a singular holiday. He would simply learn nothing at all from our attempts to find a fine shade of humor in the political economy of the poor papa, even if the poor papa were romantically occupied, not in jumping over the moon, but at least in shooting it. Of course there is much more than this in hey, diddle, diddle. The cow jumping over the moon is not only a fancy very suitable to children, it is a theme very worthy of poets. The lunar adventure may appear to some a lunatic adventure, but it is one round which the imagination of man has always revolved, especially the imagination of romantic figures like Ariosto and Siriano de Bergerac. The notion that cattle might fly has received sublime imaginative treatment. The wing-bull not only walks, as if shaking the earth amid the ruins of a Syrian sculpture, but even wheeled and flamed in heaven as the apocalyptic symbol of St. Luke. That which combines imagination so instinctive and ancient, and a single fancy so simple and so clear, is certainly not without the raw material of poetry. And the general idea, which is that of a sort of cosmic Saturnalia, or season when anything may happen, is itself an idea that has haunted humanity in a hundred forms, some of them exquisitely artistic forms. It would be easy to justify a vast number of the other nursery rhymes, in the same vein of a more serious art criticism. If I were asked to quote four lines which suffice to illustrate what has been called the imaginative reason, when it rises almost to touch an unimaginative unreason, for that point of contract is poetry, I should be content to quote four lines that were in a picture book in my own nursery. The man in the wilderness asked of me, how many strawberries grow in the sea? I answered him as I thought good, as many red herrings as grow in the wood. Everything in that is poetical, from the dark unearthly figure of the man of the desert with his mysterious riddles, to the perfect blend of logic and vision, which makes beautiful pictures, even improving them impossible. But this artistic quality, though present, is not primary. The primary purpose is the amusement of children, and we are not amusing children, we are amusing ourselves with children. Our fathers added a touch of beauty to all practical things, so they introduced fine, fantastic figures, and capering and dancing rhythms, which might be admired even by grown men, into what they primarily and practically designed to be enjoyed by children. But they did not always do this, and they never thought mainly of doing it. What they always did was to make fun fitted for the young, and what they never did was turn it into irony only intelligible to the old. A nursery rhyme was like a nursery table or a nursery cupboard, a thing constructed for a particular human purpose. They saw their aim clearly, and they achieved it. They wrote utter nonsense, and took care to make it utterly nonsensical. For there are two ways of dealing with nonsense in this world. One way is to put nonsense in the right place, as when people put nonsense into nursery rhymes. The other is to put nonsense in the wrong place, as when they put it into educational addresses, psychological criticisms, and complaints against nursery rhymes, or other normal amusements of mankind. End of Child Psychology and Nonsense by G.K. Chesterton. Home sick at home. This is LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Home sick at home by G.K. Chesterton. One, seeming to be a traveler, came to me and said, What is the shortest journey from one place to the same place? The sun was behind his head, so that his face was illegible. Surely, I said, to stand still. That is no journey at all, he replied. The shortest journey from one place to the same place is round the world. And he was gone. White wind had been born, brought up, married, and made the father of a family in the white farmhouse by the river. The river enclosed it on three sides like a castle. On the fourth side, there were stables, and beyond that, a kitchen garden, and beyond that an orchard, and beyond that a low wall, and beyond that a road, and beyond that a pine wood, and beyond that a corn field, and beyond that slopes meeting the sky, and beyond that, but we must not catalog the whole earth, though it is a great temptation. White wind had known no other home but this. Its walls were the world to him, and its roof the sky. This is what makes his actions so strange. In his later years he hardly ever went outside the door. And as he grew lazy, he grew restless, angry with himself and everyone. He found himself in some strange way weary of every moment, and hungry for the next. His heart had grown stale and bitter towards the wife and children whom he saw every day, though they were five of the good faces of the earth. He remembered, in glimpses, the days of his toil and strife for bread, when, as he came home in the evening, the thatch of his home burned with gold as though angels were standing there. But he remembered it as one remembers a dream. Now he seemed to be able to see other homes but not his own. That was merely a house. Pros had got hold of him, the ceiling of the eyes and the closing of the ears. At last something occurred in his heart, a volcano, an earthquake, an eclipse, a daybreak, a deluge, an apocalypse. We might pile up colossal words, but we should never reach it. Eight hundred times the white daylight had broken across the bear kitchen as the little family sat at breakfast. In the eight hundred and first time the father paused with the cup he was passing in his hand. That green cornfield through the window, he said dreamily, shining in the sun. Somehow, somehow it reminds me of a field outside my own home. Your own home, cried his wife, this is your home. White wind rose to his feet, singing to fill the room. He stretched forth his hand and took a staff. He stretched it forth again and took a hat. The dust came in clouds from both of them. Father, cried one child, where are you going? Home, he replied. What can you mean? This is your home. What home are you going to? To the white farmhouse by the river. This is it. He was looking at them very tranquilly when his eldest daughter cut side of his face. Oh, he is mad, she screamed, and buried her face in her hands. He spoke calmly. You are a little like my eldest daughter, he said, but you haven't got the look, no, not the look which is a welcome after work. Madam, he said, turning to his thunderstruck wife with a stately courtesy. I thank you for your hospitality, but indeed I fear I have trespassed on it too long. And my home, Father, Father answer me, is not this your home? The old man waved his stick. The rafters are cobwebbed, the walls are rain-stained, the doors bind me, the rafters crush me. There are littlenesses and bickering and heart-burnings here behind the dusty lattices where I have dosed too long, but the fire roars and the door stands open. There is bread and raiment, fire and water, and all the crafts and mysteries of love. There is rest for heavy feet on the matted floor, and for starved heart in the pure faces, far away at the end of the world, in the house where I was born. Where? Where? In the white farmhouse by the river. And he passed out of the front door, the sun shining on his face, and the other inhabitants of the white farmhouse stood staring at each other. White wind was standing on the timber bridge across the river, with the world at his feet, and a great wind came flying from the opposite edge of the sky, a land of marvelous pale golds, and met him. Some may know what that first wind outside the door is to a man. To this man it seemed that God had bent back his head by the hair, and kissed him on the forehead. He had been weary with resting, without knowing that the whole remedy lay in sun and wind, and his own body. Now he half believed that he wore the seven-legged boots. He was going home. The white farmhouse was behind every wood and beyond every mountain wall. He looked for it as we all look for fairyland, at every turn of the road. Only in one direction he never looked for it. And that was where, only a thousand yards behind him, the white farmhouse stood up, gleaning with thatch and whitewash against the gusty blue of morning. He looked at the dandelions and crickets and realized that he was gigantic. We are too fond of reckoning always by mountains. Every object is infinitely vast as well as infinitely small. He stretched himself like one crucified in an uncontainable greatness. Oh God, who hast made me in all things, hear four songs of praise, one for my feet that thou hast made strong and light upon thy daisies, one for my head which thou hast lifted and crowned above the four corners of thy heaven, one for my heart which thou hast made a heaven of angels singing thy glory, and one for that pearl-tinted cloudlet far away above the stone pines on the hill. He felt like Adam, nearly created. He had suddenly inherited all things, even the suns and stars. Have you ever been out for a walk? The story of the journey of white wind would be an epic. He was swallowed up in huge cities and forgotten. Yet he came out on the other side. He worked in quarries and in docks in country after country. Like a transmigrating soul, he lived in a series of existences, a knot of vagabonds, a colony of workmen, a crew of sailors, a group of fishermen. Each counted him a final fact in their lives, the great spare man with eyes like two stars, the stars of an ancient purpose. But he never diverged from the line that girdles the globe. On a mellow summer evening, however, he came upon the strangest thing in all his travels. He was plodding up a great dim down that hid everything, like the dome of the earth itself. Suddenly a strange feeling came over him. He glanced back at the waist of turf to see if there were any trace of boundary, for he felt like one who has just crossed the border of Elfland. With his head a belfry of new passions assailed with confounding memories. He toiled on the brow of the slope. The setting sun was reying out a universal glory. Between him and it, lying low on the fields, there was what seemed to his swimming eyes a white cloud. No, it was a marble palace. No, it was the white farmhouse by the river. He had come to the end of the world. Every spot on earth is either the beginning or the end, according to the heart of man. That is the advantage of living on an oblate spheroid. It was evening. The whole swell of turf on which he stood was turned to gold. He seemed standing in fire instead of grass. He stood so still that the birds settled on his staff. All the earth and the glory of it seemed to rejoice around the madman's homecoming. The birds on their way to their nests knew him. Nature herself was in his secret, the man who had gone from one place to the same place. But he leaned wearily on his staff. Then he raised his voice once more. Oh, God, who hast made me and all things, hear four songs of praise. One for my feet, because they are sore and slow, now that they draw near the door. One for my head, because it is bowed and hoary, now that thou cronest it with the sun. One for my heart, because thou hast taught it in sorrow, and hope deferred that it is the road that makes the home. And one for that daisy at my feet. He came down over the hillside and into the pine wood. Through the trees he could see the red and gold sunset settling down among the white farm buildings and the green apple branches. It was his home now, but it could not be his home till he had gone out from it and returned to it. Now he was the prodigal son. He came out of the pine wood and across the road. He surmounted the low wall and tramped through the orchard through the kitchen garden past the cattle sheds. And in the stony courtyard he saw his wife drawing water. End of Homestick at Home by G.K. Chesterton. On Losing One's Head, this is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recorded by Paula Santa. On Losing One's Head by G.K. Chesterton. When I was a little boy, I had an imagination, though this has long been washed out of me by the wordy abstractions of politics and journalism. For imagination, real imagination is never a vague thing of vistas. Real imagination is always materialistic. For imagination consists of images, generally graven images. There is a mad literalism about imagination, and when I had it, I turned everything that anyone mentioned into a concrete body and a staring shape. Thus, I would hear grown-up people using ordinary proverbs and figures of speech, pale, worn-out proverbs, battered, and colorless figures of speech. But every one of those phrases sprang out of me as fierce and vivid as a model written in fireworks. For some reason, I had a particularly graphic visual concept in the case of nautical metaphors. Thus, when I heard that my uncle on a sea voyage had got his sea legs, I pictured the most horrible, bodily transformations in my uncle. Had my uncle now got four legs? Or had it been necessary for his two original, and, to my eye, unobjectionable legs to be amputated by the ship's doctor? Did the new legs arrive as sort of extra luggage, or did they loathsomely grow upon him, like hair or fungoids, with all the awful unnaturalness of nature? I pictured my uncle's sea legs as two green and glittering members covered with scales like fishes and bearing some resemblance to the two fishtails with which exuberant renaissance artists sometimes provided tritons and mermaids. Again, when I heard, in some seafaring connection, that the captain kept his weather eye open, I assumed with faultless infantile logic that he kept the other one quite shut. And in some dreams, I rather pictured the captain's weather eye as being some separate and eccentric kind of eye, like that of a cyclops, an eye of blue sky or lightning that opened suddenly in his hat, or his coattails, and blazed through black fantastic tempests, a strange star of the storm. But there were many cases, even among more terrestrial and commonplace metaphors, where the material metaphor photographed itself on my fancy. One of them was the phrase about a man losing his heart. A man, considered as a material envelope, seemed so securely done up that how the heart could get out of the body was a problem analogous to that of how the apple could get into the dumpling. Perhaps, I mused, the phrase about a man having his heart in his mouth might throw some light on the somewhat revolting phrase, which spoke of a man with his heart in his boots, where there was clearly no thoroughfare. From this my childish taste turned with a certain relief to the easier and more popular picture of a man losing his head, which seemed the sort of thing that might happen to anybody. Indeed, by this dream of symbolic decapitation, I was much haunted in infancy and am not infrequently inspired and comforted even to this day. Whatever other metaphors may mean, this metaphor of the lost head has some primary and poetic meaning, and I have written many bad poems, bad fairy tales, and bad epilogues in my industrious attempt to find it out and declare it. The connection between the animal and intellectual meaning of it became close and even confused. I vaguely thought of Charles I as having lost his head equally in both senses, which is not perhaps wholly untrue. When I read of the miracle of St. Denis, who carried his head in his hand, it seemed to me quite a soothing and graceful proceeding, like a gentleman carrying his hat in his hand. St. Denis did not lose his head anyhow. He carried it in his hand, and so not to lose it, as ladies do their ridiculous handbags. Indeed, this drifting and dancing dream of decapitation in which kings and saints figured with gothic fantasticality had some kind of allegory in the core of it. The separation of body and head is a sort of symbol that the separation of body and soul, which is made by all the heresies and sophistries, which are the nightmares of the mind. The mirror materialist is a body that has lost its head. The mirror spiritualist is a head that has mislated its body. Under the same symbol can be found the old distinction between the sinner and the heretic about which theology has uttered many paradoxes, more profitable to study than some modern people fancy. For there is one kind of man who takes off his head and throws it in the gutter, who dethrones and forgets the reason that should be his ruler and witness. And the horrible headless body strides away over cities and sanctuaries, breaking them down and treading them into mire in blood. He is the criminal. But there is another figure equally sinister and strange. This man forgets his body, with all its instinctive annesties and recurrent sanities and laws of God. He leaves his body working in the fields like a slave, and the head goes away to think alone. The head, detached and dehumanized, thinks faster and faster like a clock on mad. It is never heated by any generous blood, never softened by any healthy fatigue, never checked or warned by any of the terrible toxins of instinct. The head thinks because it cannot do anything else, because it cannot feel or doubt or know. This man is the heretic, and in this way all the heresies were made. The anarchist goes off his head, and the sophist goes off his body. I will not renew the old dispute about which is the worse amputation, but I should recommend the prudent reader to avoid both. End of Unlosing One's Head by G.K. Chesterton What I found in my pocket. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Michael Robinson. What I Found in My Pocket by G.K. Chesterton Once when I was very young I met one of those men who have made the empire what it is. A man in an asterkin coat with an asterkin mustache, a tight black curly mustache. Whether he put on the mustache with the coat, or whether his Napoleonic will enabled him not only to grow a mustache in the usual place, but also to grow little mustaches all over his clothes, I do not know. I only remember that he said to me the following words. A man can't get on nowadays by hanging about with his hands in his pockets. I made the reply with quite obvious flippancy that perhaps a man got on by having his hands in other people's pockets, whereupon he began to argue about moral evolution, so I suppose what I said had some truth in it. But the incident now comes back to me and connects itself with another incident, if you can call it an incident, which happened to me only the other day. I have only once in my life picked a pocket, and then, perhaps through some absent mindedness, I picked my own. My act can really with some reason be so described. For in taking things out of my own pocket I had at least one of the more tense and quivering emotions of the thief. I had a complete ignorance and a profound curiosity as to what I should find there. Perhaps it would be the exaggeration of eulogy to call me a tidy person, but I can always pretty satisfactorily account for all my possessions. I can always tell where they are and what I have done with them, so long as I keep them out of my pockets. If once anything slips into those unknown abysses, I wave at a sad Virgillian farewell. I suppose the things that I have dropped into my pockets are still there. The same presumption applies to the things that I have dropped into the sea, but I regard the riches stored in both these bottomless chasms with the same reverent ignorance. They tell us that on the last day the sea will give up its dead. And I suppose that on the same occasion long strings of extraordinary things will come running out of my pockets, but I have quite forgotten what any of them are. And there is really nothing, except the money, that I shall be at all surprised at finding among them. Such at least has hitherto been my state of innocence. I here only wish briefly to recall the special, extraordinary, and hitherto unprecedented circumstances which led me in cold blood, and being of sound mind, to turn out my pockets. I was locked up in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey. The time was towards evening, but it might have been anything, for everything resembling earth or sky or light or shade was painted out as if with a great wet brush by an unshifting sheet of quite colourless rain. I had no books or newspapers. I had not even a pencil and a scrap of paper with which to write a religious epic. There were no advertisements on the walls of the carriage. Otherwise I could have plunged into the study, for any collection of printed words is quite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. When I find myself opposite the words sunlight soap, I can exhaust all the aspects of sun worship, Apollo, and summer poetry before I go on to the less congenial subject of soap. But there was no printed word or picture anywhere. There was nothing but blank wood inside the carriage and blank wet without. Now I deny most energetically that anything is or can be uninteresting. So I steered at the joints of the walls and seats, and began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood. Just as I had begun to realise why, perhaps, it was that Christ was a carpenter rather than a brick layer or a baker or anything else. I suddenly started upright and remembered my pockets. I was carrying about with me an unknown treasury. I had a British Museum and a South Kensington collection of unknown curios hung all over me in different places. I began to take the things out. The first thing I came upon consisted of piles and heaps of vattersea tram tickets. There were enough to equip a paper chase. They shook down in showers like confetti. Primarily, of course, they touched my patriotic emotions and brought tears to my eyes. Also, they provided me with the printed matter I required, for I found on the back of them some short but striking little scientific essays about some kind of pill. Comparatively speaking, in my then destitution, those tickets might be regarded as a small but well-chosen scientific library. Should my railway journey continue, which seemed likely at the time, for a few months longer, I could imagine myself throwing myself into the controversial aspects of the pill, composing replies and rejoinders, pro and con, upon the data furnished to me. But after all it was the symbolic quality of the tickets that moved me most, for as certainly as the cross of Satan James means English patriotism, those scraps of paper meant all that municipal patriotism, which is now, perhaps, the greatest hope of England. The next thing that I took out was a pocket knife. A pocket knife, I need hardly say, would require a thick book of full moral meditations all to itself. A knife typifies one of the most primary of those practical origins upon which, as upon lo, thick pillows all our human civilization reposes. Metals, the mystery of the thing called iron and of the thing called steel, led me off half days into a kind of dream. I saw into the entrails of dim, damp wood, where the first man among all the common stones found the strange stone. I saw a vague and violent battle in which stone axes broke and stone knives were splintered against something shining and new in the hand of one desperate man. I heard all the hammers on all the anvils of the earth. I saw all the swords of feudal and all the wheels of industrial war. For the knife is only a short sword, and the pocket knife is a secret sword. I opened it and looked at that brilliant and terrible tongue which we call a blade, and I thought that perhaps it was the symbol of the oldest of the needs of man. The next moment I knew that I was wrong for the thing that came next out of my pocket was a box of matches. When I saw fire, which is stronger even than steel, the old, fierce, female thing we all love, but dare not touch. The next thing I found was a piece of chalk, and I saw in it all the art and all the frescoes of the world. The next was a coin of very modest value, and I saw in it not only the image and superscription of our own Caesar, but all government and order since the world began. But I have not space to say what were the items in the long and splendid procession of poetical symbols that came pouring out. I cannot tell you all the things that were in my pocket. I can tell you one thing, however, that I could not find in my pocket. I allude to my railway ticket. And of what I found in my pocket by G. K. Chesterton to Francis. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Garth Donald to Francis by G. K. Chesterton. An excerpt from a letter to his fiancee, Francis. When we set up a house, darling, honeysuckle porch, euclips hedge, bees, poetry, and eight shillings a week, I think that you will have to do the shopping, particularly at Felix Stowe. There was a great and glorious man who said, give us the luxuries of life, and we will dispense with the necessities. That, I think, would be a splendid motto to write in letters of brown gold, over the porch of our hypothetical home. There will be a sofa for you, for example, but no chairs, for I prefer the floor. There will be a select store of chocolate creams to make you do the carp with, and the rest will be bread and water. We will each retain a suit of evening dress for great occasions, and at other times clothe ourselves in the skins of wild beasts. How pretty you would look. Which would fit your taste in furs and be economical? I have sometimes thought it would be very fine to take an ordinary house, a very poor, commonplace house in West Kensington, say, and make it symbolic. Not artistic, heaven, heaven forbid. My blood boils when I think of the affronts put on by Noctane pictorial epicures on the strong, honest, ugly, patient shapes of necessary things, the brave old bones of life. There are aesthetic pattering prigs who can look on a saucepan without one tear of joy or sadness, mongrel decadence that can see no dignity in the honorable scars of a kettle. So they concentrate all their house decorations on colored windows that no one looks out of, vases of lilies that everyone wishes out of the way. No. My idea, which is much cheaper, is to make a house really allegoric, really explain its own essential meaning. Mystical or ancient saying should be inscribed on every object, the more prosaic the object the better, and the more coarsely and rudely the inscription was traced the better. Hast thou sent the rain upon the earth, should be inscribed on the umbrella stand, perhaps on the umbrella? Even the hairs on your head are all numbered, would give a tremendous significance to one's hairbrushes. The words about living water would reveal the music and sanctity of the sink. While our God is a consuming fire, might be written over the kitchen grate to assist with the mystical musings of the cook. Shall we ever try that experiment, dearest? Perhaps not, for no words would be golden enough for the tools you had to touch. Your beauty would be enough for one house. In novels, romances, scientific reports, and similar documents, we have all come across the story of the man who, on waking up, forgets his name and wanders out into the streets without an identity. He can exercise an ordinary intelligence. He can perform all ordinary functions, but he cannot remember who he is. I am in this position, but then, as it is a comfort to me to reflect, so are you. Every human being has forgotten who he is and where he came from. We are all blasted with one great obliteration of memory. We none of us saw ourselves born, and, if we had, it would not have cleared up the mystery. Parents are a delight, but they are not an explanation. The one thing that no man, however adventurous, can get behind is his own existence. The one thing that no man, however learned, can ever know is his own name. It is easier to comprehend the cosmos than to comprehend the ego. It is easier even to know where you are than to know who you are. We have forgotten our own meaning, and we are all wandering about the streets without keepers. All that we call common sense and practicality and worldly wisdom only means that we forgot that we have forgotten. All that we mean by religion and poetry only means that for one wild moment we remember that we forgot. I was sitting the other day on a heap of stones in the Isle of Thainett when I had remembered that I had forgotten. Not a straw had stirred, not a bird had spoken, but my blood ran cold, and I knew at once that I was in fairyland. The commonplace country landscape of Thainett lend itself more to the fairy notion than any imaginable mountains or lakes or caves. It is always easier to see this elvish look in plain and familiar objects because of the fact that men in our day mostly fail to understand, because it is exactly the homeliest part of man that is nearest to heaven and hell. We can think of a stool or a pot being bewitched. We cannot easily think of a cartoon by Raphael being bewitched. Neither can we easily think of the Alps being bewitched. It would require a witch of some force of character, but a domestic and even prosaic landscape, like that of this fiat corner of Kent, can be soaked in a supernaturalism all the more awful from being detached and alien from the landscape itself. Everything that stood up around me stood up as shapeless, and yet was some horrible hint of the human shape. Everything looked as if it had a face somewhere, but a face that was hidden or turned away. I seemed to be looking at the ugly back of everything. The stunted hedge looked like a line of hoary and hairy hobgoblins, staring away from me towards the sun. The dwarfish trees were deformed and twisted by the silent and evil magic of the sea. They seemed to have humpbacks and hidden faces. Everything was at once secretive and vigilant, even the heap of stones beneath me seemed to be all eyes. But all external oddities were secondary to, or perhaps only symbolic of, the sudden sense of a sacred and splendid ignorance that had fallen upon my soul, the enigma of being alive. Saints have not discovered the answer. Philosophers have not even discovered the riddle. But in that moment, at least, I remembered that I could not remember. But there is one merely human work in which the fundamental mood is truly and wisely recorded. I mean, in the fairy tales. I can never understand why it is that those who happen to disbelieve in Christianity do not go back to the great, healthy, permanent human tradition outside Christianity. Because you cannot rise to the faith, you need not sink to natural philosophy. If I did not put my faith in the Gospel, I should not put it in Hechel. I should put it in Jack the Giant Killer. I should put it in these enduring human stories, with their celebration of hope, surprise, courage, the fulfillment of contracts, and the natural relations of mankind. The point is apart from my present purpose, and I will not pursue it here, but I fancy that it is one of the strange testimonies to Christianity that its opponents do not get clear of it into the original human condition, become mad with mere reaction and anarchy. Those who object to the faith often object to the human fables. Those who dislike Christianity carry their absurdity to the point of disliking paganism, too. The essence of fairyland is this, that it is a country of which we do not know the laws. This is also a peculiarity of the universe in which we live. We do not know anything about the laws of nature. We do not even know whether they are laws. All that we can do is to take first by faith from our parents, aunts, and nurses, and afterwards by very meager experiment, during the miserably insufficient period of three score years and ten, the general proposition that there is some sort of strange connection, often repeated but still unexplained, between lighted gunpowder and a loud bang. And it is here that we may see the deep and sound philosophy of the fairy tale. The chemist says, Mix these three substances, and the bang will follow. The good wizard in the fairy tale says, Eat these three apples, and the giant's head will fall off. But the chemist talks in a particular tone and style, which suggests that there is an abstract philosophy, some sort of inevitable connection between the three substances and the bang. Sometimes he calls it a necessity, which means a thing that cannot be broken. Sometimes he calls it a law, which means a thing that can be broken. But he always means that the mind sees a connection between the two things, as the mind sees a connection between four and eight. And the mind does nothing of the sort. The fairy tale method is far more philosophical. The wizard says, Do this one extraordinary thing, and that other totally different extraordinary thing does continually follow. I don't know why it does. I don't even know that it will always do it. But it is a tip worth knowing when you want to kill a giant. We do not know that these natural repetitions all around us are laws. We do not know that they are necessities. What we do know about them is that they are magic spells. That is, conditions which exist, but the nature of which is mystical altogether. Water is bewitched so that it always goes downhill. Birds are bewitched so that they fly. The sun is bewitched so that it shines. I rose from the heap of stones, having become altogether a citizen of fair then. I grasped my stick like a sword, and went up the white road looking for giants. I was disappointed for some little time. The two or three people whom I met being, so far as I could estimate, actually smaller than myself. But there was something of a rapid rigidity in the road running in front of me, like a lean white hound that dragged me on in undiminished confidence in the wonders that awaited me, far as a mark of the essential morality of fairyland, a thing too commonly overlooked. That happiness in fairyland, like happiness anywhere else, involves an object and even a challenge. We can only admire scenery if we want to get past it. No man takes his ease in elf land as in the land of the Lotus Eater. Children are its citizens, and children do not want to take their ease. I hoped to find a castle and an ogre. If I had luck a three-headed ogre for an elf land, all sport is the defiance of something stronger. Our only hunting is the hunting of big game. I wanted him large and wicked, very wicked. A minute after, the road and hedge turned at an abrupt angle, and I saw before me something that snapped my last faith in reasonable things. There in front of me, solid and silent in the sun, was the unmistakable ogre's castle, turreted and castellated with an extravagant skyline, exactly as I had seen it brightly colored in my nursery picture books. With all my elvish feelings, I had not really believed that I should find such a fantastic fortress on a road in Kent. Turning to a fat elderly countryman, who was standing by a haystack, himself no doubt a fairy, I said, Who lives in this place? My place, he said. Why, that's Mr. Harry Mark's place. And I leaned upon my stick, engaged in thought of the war in elf land. Readers note, Harry Marks was an Englishman who engaged in many fraudulent business schemes at the time of his death in 1916. He owned a 200-acre estate in Kent.