'On Running After One's Hat'

[fiefoe]

Gilbert 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.