I first started listing the books I read in 1972 and continued, with a six month lacuna around 1992, to the present day. Of one thing I am sure: It was Jorge Luis Borges who pointed the way to G. K. Chesterton. Though what I discovered from reading him is slightly different from what Borges discovered.

First of all, there was in Chesterton’s fiction what I call moral landscape, in which the natural environment in the scene takes place is affected by the feeling conveyed by the narrator. Take, for instance, this paragraph from the first chapter of The Man Who Was Thursday:

This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.

If I were designing a cover for a new edition of the book, the scene described in this paragraph is what I would attempt to depict.

Thursday was my first Chesterton. There were lines in the novel that affected me strongly. In the same opening chapter, the poet Gabriel Syme is made to say:

“All the same,” replied Syme patiently, “just at present you only see the tree by the light of the lamp. I wonder when you would ever see the lamp by the light of the tree.”

What went through my mind at this point was, “Wow!” That line is forever emblazoned in my memory as the absolute height of imagination. I went on to read all of Chesterton’s fiction, then moved over to his essays and even his religious works. Curiously, although Chesterton is perhaps most famous for his father Brown stories, I did not read those until relatively recently.

But I have read The Man Who Was Thursday four or five times. As a matter of fact, I should re-read it again soon.