Wednesday, April 11, 2007

For Hilary

GABRIEL SYME was not merely a detective who pretended to be a poet; he was really a poet who had become a detective. Nor was his hatred of anarchy hypocritical. He was one of those who are driven early in life into too conservative an attitude by the bewildering folly of most revolutionists. He had not attained it by any tame tradition. His respectability was spontaneous and sudden, a rebellion against rebellion. He came of a family of cranks, in which all the oldest people had all the newest notions. One of his uncles always walked about without a hat, and another had made an unsuccessful attempt to walk about with a hat and nothing else. His father cultivated art and self‑realisation; his mother went in for simplicity and hygiene. Hence the child, during his tenderer years, was wholly unacquainted with any drink between the extremes of absinth and cocoa, of both of which he had a healthy dislike. The more his mother preached a more than Puritan abstinence the more did his father expand into a more than pagan latitude; and by the time the former had come to enforcing vegetarianism, the latter had pretty well reached the point of defending cannibalism.

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:

Ttony said...

You are Pierre Menard and I claim my £5!

Many many thanks.

Hilary Jane Margaret White said...

Thanks Ben. Nice tip. I've been meaning to take up smoking for some time. Not cigars though; they're not ladylike.

Anonymous said...

Fr Tim has been forced to remove the New Mass Texts, they available here
http://newmasstexts.blogspot.com/

Anna MR said...

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