'On Running After One's Hat'
Dec. 11th, 2008 07:40 pmGilbert Keith Chesterton arguably at his best.
- There is nothing so perfectly poetical as an island;
- But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite as practical as the other.
- No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures. Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are like a new sun and a new moon.
- There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic.
- And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing--such as making love.
- But I pointed out to him that this sense of wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out easily.
- Inconvenience, as I have said, is only one aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a really romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.