Being surrounded with every conceivable kind of revolt from infancy, Gabriel had to revolt into something, so he revolted into the only thing left— sanity. But there was just enough in him of the blood of these fanatics to make even his protest for common sense a little too fierce to be sensible. His hatred of modern lawlessness had been crowned also by an accident. It happened that he was walking in a side street at the instant of a dynamite outrage. He had been blind and deaf for a moment, and then seen, the smoke clearing, the broken windows and the bleeding faces. After that he went about as usual—quiet, courteous, rather gentle; but there was a spot on his mind that was not sane. He did not regard anarchists, as most of us do, as a handful of morbid men, combining ignorance with intellectualism. He regarded them as a huge and pitiless peril, like a Chinese invasion.
He poured perpetually into newspapers and their waste‑paper baskets a torrent of tales, verses and violent articles, warning men of this deluge of barbaric denial. But he seemed to be getting no nearer his enemy, and, what was worse, no nearer a living. As he paced the Thames embankment, bitterly biting a cheap cigar and brooding on the advance of Anarchy, there was no anarchist with a bomb in his pocket so savage or so solitary as he...GK Chesterton - The Man Who Was Thursday
4 comments:
You are Pierre Menard and I claim my £5!
Many many thanks.
Thanks Ben. Nice tip. I've been meaning to take up smoking for some time. Not cigars though; they're not ladylike.
Fr Tim has been forced to remove the New Mass Texts, they available here
http://newmasstexts.blogspot.com/
Moretben, hello. I have been forced to link to you via one of my comment posts, on my site - this is because yours was the first site google could come up with to have Animula. I like to link relevant (or indeed, screamingly irrelevant) poems, videoclips etc as the signature web site address on some of my comments and replies - so I am not posing as you, ok? I shall resist the temptation to do the comment link here, though, so you can see who I am.
Your site looks most interesting. I shall bookmark and peruse at a better time. All the best in the future. x
Post a Comment