In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton

Available : American Chesterton Society

I've been  buying a Chesterton book a month and this was my April book.  From the title you might think it a psychological treatise, but it's not.  It's a collection of 67 essays on everything under the sun.

SIXTY-SEVEN essays, you say?  Considering that he wrote over 5000, it was hard to pick out only 67 to represent the best. That's what three Chesterton scholars, Dale Ahlquist, Aidan Mackey, and Joseph Pearce say in their intros to the work  I think they did a good job in choosing.  There were some I had already read and some that have never been printed before.  The variety of topics is astounding:  skeletons, cheese, chalk, fireworks, rain, literary critcism and so much more.

Of special interest to me was "On certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family", "The Drift from Domesticity", "Marriage and the Modern Mind","The Romance of Childhood", "What is Right with the World" and "Babies and Distributism".  They may sound a little dull, but they are full of witty phrases and surprises.  Reading Chesterton is like taking a mental jog.

The best essay in my opinion is "Twelve Men".  It is about jury duty and should be required reading in civics classes, but probably couldn't be used because it has religious overtones.

Several of the essays are just completely charming.  "The Romantic in the Rain"  has me wanting to throw away my umbrella and get a "mackintosh" and go out to join the downpour.  "{The rain} gives the roads....something of the beauty of Venice.  Shallow lakes of water reiterate every detail of earth and sky....the sense of a Celestial topsy-turvydom.....It will always give a man the strange sense of looking down at the skies".

"What I Found in my Pocket" has G.K. stranded at a station with nothing to read, not even posters on the wall.  So, he amuses himself with the things in his pockets.  In another essay, "Cheese" ( a subject on which "poets have been mysteriously silent" )   has finally been treated with the dignity it deserves.

My favorite, though, is "A Piece of Chalk".  In it, G.K. takes a box of colored chalk and some brown paper borrowed from his landlady and goes out for a hike into the countryside:

"I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw.  Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature.  I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colors on brown paper.  They are so much better worth drawing than Nature;  also, they are much easier to draw.  When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrepeds.  So I drew the soul of the cow;  which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight;  and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all the beasts."

 He then discovers that his box of chalk has no white, which everyone knows you really, really need when drawing on brown paper!  How he solves this dilemma is amusing.

More amazing than the variety of topics is the continuity of Chesterton's thought that ties everything together.   As it says on the back cover of the book:  "Here is a veritable feast for the mind and the soul".