Alarms and Discursions
1910
Chesterton transforms the overlooked into the astonishing. In these essays, originally written for the Daily News, he finds philosophy in a stroll around Marble Arch, discovers wonder in telegraph poles, and mounts a spirited defense of English cheese against the forces of modernity. The collection opens with "On Gargoyles," a wondrous meditation on how the grotesque and the beautiful must coexist in art and life, an allegory about a priest and his people learning to embrace all of creation, the ugly alongside the sublime. This acceptance of chaos and imperfection runs through every page as Chesterton skewers the modern world's pretension toward sterile rationality. His essays are paradoxical fireworks: serious play, philosophical jokes, orthodox heterodoxy. Here is a man who defends tradition by being thoroughly modern, who finds the extraordinary in the ordinary, who looks at a gargoyle and sees the entire drama of human existence. For readers who have forgotten how to be astonished by the world, this collection is a remedy.
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“Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Monotony has nothing to do with a place; monotony, either in its sensation or its infliction, is simply the quality of a person. There are no dreary sights; there are only dreary sight seers.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“But whenever one meets modern thinkers (as one often does) progressing towards a madhouse, one always finds, on inquiry, that they have just had a splendid escape from another madhouse. Thus, hundreds of people become Socialists, not because they have tried Socialism and found it nice, but because they have tried Individualism and found it nasty.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Realism is simply Romanticism that has lost its reason...that is its reason for existing.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Modern art has to be what is called ‘intense.’ it is not easy to define being intense; but, roughly speaking, it means saying only one thing at a time, and saying it wrong.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Humour is meant, in a literal sense, to make game of man; that is, to dethrone him from his official dignity and hunt him like game.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“There is a certain solid use in fools. It is not so much that they rush in where angels fear to tread, but rather that they let out what devils intend to do.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Roughly speaking, there are three kinds of people in the world…the division follows lines of real psychological cleavage. I do not offer it lightly. It has been the fruit of more than eighteen minutes of earnest reflection and research.””
— G. K. Chesterton
“Modern tragic writers have to write short stories; if they wrote long stories…cheerfulness would creep in. Such stories are like stings; brief, but purely painful.””
— G. K. Chesterton
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