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Epiphanies: Chesterton’s Man Who Was Thursday

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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.

Epiphanies: Borges’ Labyrinths

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Jorge Luis Borges Story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”

This is the first of a series of posts about literary works that got ,e started in becoming the person I am today. It all started with a New Yorker article around 1970 which introduced me to Latin American magical realism. I was enthralled, so I hunted up the two Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) books it mentioned: Labyrinths and Ficciones.

Borges really got me started on a quest that is still going strong more than half a century later. The first book I read was Labyrinths, and the first story in that collection was “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” As soon as I read the following, I was on my way:

From the remote depths of the corridor, the mirror spied on us. We discovered (such a discovery is inevitable in the late hours of the night) that mirrors have something monstrous about them. Then [Argentinian writer Adolfo] Bioy Casares recalled that one of the heresiarchs of Uqbar had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable, because they increase the numbers of men.

It turns out that Bioy Casares was quoting from a strange encyclopedia that the two of them decide to look up, but have difficulty finding, because different editions of the Anglo-American Cyclopedia have different articles.

I now own everything that Borges ever wrote that has been translated into English, and several in the original Spanish. Borges sent me in many directions. The next time, I will talk about how he turned me on to G. K. Chesterton.

Pitocchetto

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Giacomo Ceruti’s “The Beggar at Rest”

Yesterday, I decided to escape the summer heat by visiting the Getty Center and reveling in some great works of art. One of my favorite discoveries was a whole gallery full of paintings by the Italian Giacomo Ceruti (1698-1767). He was known as Pitocchetto, which means “The Little Beggar,” probably because so many of his paintings highlighted beggars, the poor, and people in humble occupations.

It’s a nice change from all the magnificent kings, princes, and nobles resplendent in gold and silk. One art critic, Mira Pajes Merriman, writes that Ceruti’s paintings confront us with

the detritus of the community; the displaced and homeless poor; the old and the young with their ubiquitous spindles, eloquent signs of their situationless poverty and unwanted labor; orphans in their orderly, joyless asylums plying their unpaid toil; urchins of the streets eking out small coins as porters, and sating them in gambling; the diseased, palsied, and deformed; lonely vagabonds; even a stranger from Africa—and all in tatters and filthy rags, almost all with eyes that address us directly…

And yet, confronted with one of his paintings, one is arrested by a different vision of the baroque era, not so different from our own tent encampments of the homeless.

“The Dwarf” by Giacomo Ceruti

One thing that sets Ceruti apart is that he allows his subjects their dignity, irrespective of the lowliness of their social status. He is above all a compassionate artist who is not above showing us an alternative picture of his times.

Orcs

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Halfway through my re-reading of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, I have come to realize that orcs really do exist. They are capable of only one feeling: Rage. And they meekly do the bidding of the Dark Lord, who is squirming in frustration at Mordor-a-Lago as further indictments attempt to break his power forever. They are distributed across the land, but most particularly in what has been referred to as the Red States.

Am I perhaps being too simple-minded? Perhaps. But the peace of Middle-Earth is in danger of being shattered forever. The land in which I was raised is being threatened by dark hordes who, while waving the same flag to which I pay allegiance, are quite satisfied to stomp on and destroy everything it stands for.

Somehow, over the last few decades, we have been nurturing a generation of thugs who have declared unending enmity with the elves and other libtards whom they feel have been sneering at them.

Oh, where is that ring of power now that I want to throw it into a white-hot dumpster fire?