avevale_intelligencer | (no subject)

I haven't plugged G K Chesterton for a while, so here we are again.

If you can find a book called "Tales of the Long Bow," (I think Project Gutenberg has it as a free ebook) you will be amazed, I believe. He puts his finger exactly on what is going on now, in business and healthcare and the environment--this man was writing about pollution in 1925, for frod's sake. And he tells a fine and funny story in the process.

And then there's this, called "To A Certain Nation":

We will not let thee be, for thou art ours.
We thank thee still, though thou forget these things,
For that hour's sake when thou didst wake all powers
With a great cry that God was sick of kings.

[...]

Thou hast a right to rule thyself; to be
The thing thou wilt; to grin, to fawn, to creep;
To crown these clumsy liars; aye, and we
Who knew thee once, we have a right to weep.

(He was writing about France, at the time of the Dreyfus case, which is why I've left out the middle verses. I, of course, am thinking of another nation altogether, or possibly two.)

So much wealth of wit and wisdom, to be so abandoned and forgotten by the world...

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I searched on Yahoo, and found this page, with a list of all Chesterton's works available on the Web:

G K Chesterton Book List

Hope folks find it useful.

BTW, do you have any suggestions on where to start....there is so much to try here that I am honestly not sure where to begin to delve......

my maternal grandfather, tho I never got the chance to meet him, played cello at one of GK Chesterton's garden parties.

I think the best of his novels is The Man Who Was Thursday (and I'm amazed to find a dramatisation of it: that's downloaded for later, and thank you for pointing me at it!!). The Father Brown short stories are great fun, and about the only thing he's remembered for. To get an idea of how he wrote non-fiction, you could try Orthodoxy, of which I am very fond. The essays and the poems...as you say, too many: just dive in and see what you find.

Coo. Well, maybe you can come and play kalimba at one of mine. (Of course, first we need to find the garden again...)

Thanks -- will download the ones you just suggested, as well as the one in your original entry, and dive in.