Gilbert Keith Chesterson

[Mark Kohut]

Jill,
   
  My take: TRP was raised Catholic, conservative Catholic, given his time. Chesterton was that also....
   
  TRPs anti-modern ageness aligns him with many 'conservatives"...(overlooked by those who see him only as a "leftist"....)......he has many notions and tropes in common with some of the best 'conservatives", esp. those with a spiritual,[religious] conservatism, I think.
   
  would not surprise me to learn that TRP has read Chesterton, but of course, I just figure he
  has read everyone relevant.........
   
  Mark

"grladams at teleport.com" <grladams at teleport.com> wrote:
  Just discovered GKC. His writings seem to predict the forms of thinking
that TRP is fond of, Gilbert Keith Chesterson 1874–1936


Telegraph Poles
All the amateur lines seemed to reel to right and left. A moment before I
could have sworn they stood as straight as lances; now I could see them
curve and waver everywhere, like scimitars and yataghans. Compared with the
telegraph post the pines were crooked--and alive. That lonely vertical rod
at once deformed and enfranchised the forest. It tangled it all together
and yet made it free, like any grotesque undergrowth of oak or holly.

"Yes," said my gloomy friend, answering my thoughts. "You don't know what a
wicked shameful thing straightness is if you think these trees are
straight. You never will know till your precious intellectual civilization
builds a forty-mile forest of telegraph poles."
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alarms_and_Discursions#The_Telegraph_Poles

You will find, I mean, that rich colours actually look more luminous on a
grey day, because they are seen against a sombre background and seem to be
burning with a lustre of their own. Against a dark sky all flowers look
like fireworks. There is something strange about them, at once vivid and
secret, like flowers traced in fire in the phantasmal garden of a witch. A
bright blue sky is necessarily the high light of the picture; and its
brightness kills all the bright blue flowers. But on a grey day the
larkspur looks like fallen heaven; the red daisies are really the red lost
eyes of day; and the sunflower is the vice-regent of the sun.

Lastly, there is this value about the colour that men call colourless; that
it suggests in some way the mixed and troubled average of existence,
especially in its quality of strife and expectation and promise. Grey is a
colour that always seems on the eve of changing to some other colour; of
brightening into blue or blanching into white or bursting into green and
gold. So we may be perpetually reminded of the indefinite hope that is in
doubt itself; and when there is grey weather in our hills or grey hairs in
our heads, perhaps they may still remind us of the morning.
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alarms_and_Discursions#The_Glory_of_Grey

There are others, such as his poke at anarchists .. many others.. too many
to read it seems. if anyone knows of any other key writings of GKC in
relation to ATD I'd be keen to see them...
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Alarms_and_Discursions#The_Anarchist

and good background reading about the conflict between England and Germany
in here, in chapter IX the Awakening of england where I got alot out of the
explanation of Montenegro's role .. and you can see casual mention of
Pythagorean mysticism, as if it were commonplace to use words like
"Pythagorean worship of number..."
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Crimes_of_England


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