Tremendous Trifles

G.K. Chesterton performs a rather daring trick in these pages: he convinces you that a piece of chalk is the gateway to the infinite, that standing in a field might be an adventure worthy of Odysseus, and that the most trivial things contain the most enormous secrets. This collection of thirty-nine essays and sketches, written with the irrepressible joy of a man who has just discovered the world is stranger and more magnificent than anyone dared believe, invites readers to slow down and actually look at what they have been too busy to see. The book opens with an allegory of two boys who wish to become a giant and a pygmy, and what they discover in their transformed states proves Chesterton's central conviction: that perspective is everything, and that the small can be vast and the vast can be small. Through whimsy, argument, and sheer verbal wizardry, he defends the jury system, argues for reading fairy tales to children, and demonstrates how a drawing exercise becomes a meditation on truth. This is philosophy disguised as entertainment, or perhaps entertainment disguised as philosophy. Either way, it is a book that remakes the reader's eyes so that ordinary life looks, at last, properly astonishing.