What's Right With the World

From GKC via Nancy Brown, etc.

For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man's life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St. Louis Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won't, to the end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, more

Chesterton on You Tube, part 2

Chesterton on You Tube

Advice for Angela

Angela, one of my co-workers is getting married soon. When her fiance arrived to take her home, Paul--the only other male on staff at St. Max--and I seized the opportunity to pontificate a little about married life.

My advice (to the fiance) was "If you think about it, you're not all that attached to your opinion." I owe my life of bliss to following that proverb, and I don't care who knows it. Consequently, my recommendation to every engaged man is "Surrender. Resistance is futile."

Paul's wisdom was directed toward Angela: "You have three years to train him. If you don't like how is by then, it's your own fault."

Of course, Chesterton, who wrote "Marriage is a duel to the death that no man of honor should refuse," is far more poetical in his advice:

"Every woman has to find out that her husband is a selfish beast, because every man is a selfish beast by the standard of a woman. But let her find out the beast while they are both still in the story of 'Beauty and the Beast.' Every man has to find out that his wife is cross -- that is to say, sensitive to the point of madness: for every woman is mad by the masculine standard. But let him find out that she is mad while her madness is more worth considering than anyone else's sanity."
-- G.K. Chesterton, "Two Stubborn Pieces of Iron" in The Common Man

Angela, may you and John's domestic safari be as wild and fun as mine has been.

HT to Chestertonian at the Blue Boar for the Chesterton quotation.

One Wild Place...

The Chesterton quotation I have in my header says:

For a plain, hard-working man the home is not the one tame place in the world of adventure. It is the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.

This afternoon, Chesterton was proven right yet again.

I came in from my office to get a glass of water and I spied my little Olivia talking to her mother in the hallway. From the waist up Liva was the pretty Catholic school girl I had just brought home from Kindergarten; from the waist down she looked like Eve shortly after the Fall of Man.

Why are you in your underwear?
Because.
Because what?
Because we're having an underwear picnic on the trampoline.
Ah. Of course.

Milady tells me that's also the reason the baby was diaperless and crying when I came in. Thank God we don't live where they actually have Winters...

Chesterton Monologue

I just saw a link to this on the blog of the American Chesterton Society.

My New License Plate

Seriously, how cool am I?

Worth a Read

http://www.catholicexchange.com/node/64091

Of Hooks and Mirrors

I called this blog the Natalist Diaries because I wanted it to be a sort of field journal of my domestic safari. Home, as my man GK puts it, is “the one wild place in the world of rules and set tasks.” Truer words were never spoken. This morning the Queen informed me of some very strange goings on indeed.

Apparently, my eldest daughter, Sophia has been having nightmares. She’s always struggled with being fearful at night, but this time her fear is so outrageous (even for her) that I had to comment on it.

Two nights ago, Sophia crawls into our bed apologizing to Amy for the dream she just had (this is a quality of her first-born, “I-have-to-be-perfect-and-never-do-anything-that-might displease-my-parents” constitution).

“Don’t get mad at me,” she whimpers, “but does Olivia have a hook for a hand?” (Olivia is our two-handed third child.)

“No, sweetie, Olivia doesn’t have a hook for hand.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m pretty sure.”

What elevates this incident from the mundane to the ridiculous is that Sophia kept asking Amy if Olivia had a hook for hand all the next day.

“Mama, are you sure she doesn’t have a hook for a hand?”

“Sophia, she’s standing right there. Look at her HANDS.”

“Okay, Mama, but are you sure?”

This is life with Sophia, our little actress. She’s an amazing kid—smart, funny, kind, beautiful, fashionable—but everything that happens to her is so the drama, all the time.

The funny thing about this hook-for-a-hand farce is that it really isn’t about Olivia, it’s about Sophia. What would she ever do with hook-handed little sister? This is just another of countless examples of her unselfconscious ego-centricism. She’s completely oblivious to her narcissism.

Sometimes she’ll come in at night, worried about kidnappers.

“Mama, are you sure no one’s going to come and steal me through the window?”

“Yes, Sophia. I’m sure.”

I always like to chime in at this point.

“Sophia, why would someone want to steal you? Think about it: why would a bad guy break into your window, which has a locked shutter and a chest of drawers pushed up against it, just to steal the heaviest, most verbal kid in the family? The baby’s in the room next to yours and he’s way more portable than you are and far more likely to forget about Mama and Papi as he grows up poor in a dirty trailer park with desperate, unfashionable, kid-stealing foster parents.”

Silence.

“Mama, are you sure no bad guys are going to take me?”

What amazes me is that as crazy as my kids can be, they always hold a mirror to my own irrationality. It seems each of our kids embodies some of the good and bad traits of Mama and Papi. This makes for a pretty entertaining home life, but it also serves as looking glass for the Queen and me to see our own faults and strengths.

In Sophia, I see so many of my irrational fears and so much of my unwitting selfishness; but, thanks be to God, I also see such a desire for goodness and so much beauty, creativity, and trust.

Apparently, Chesterton has met my son...

What can they mean when they say that we must not put militarism into boys? Can we by any possibility get militarism out of boys? You might burn it out with red-hot irons; you might eventually scourge it out as if it were a mediaeval devil; but except you employ the most poignant form of actual persecution, you certainly will not prevent little boys thinking about soldiers, talking about soldiers, and pretending that they are soldiers. You may mortify and macerate this feeling in them if you like, just as you may mortify and macerate their love of comrades, or their love of wandering…

A child’s instinct is almost perfect in the matter of fighting; a child always stands for the good militarism as against the bad. The child’s hero is always the man or boy who defends himself suddenly and splendidly against aggression. The child’s hero is never the man or boy who attempts by his mere personal force to extend his mere personal influence… To put the matter shortly, the boy feels an abysmal difference between conquest and victory. Conquest has the sound of something cold and heavy; the automatic operations of a powerful army. Victory has the sound of something sudden and valiant; victory is like a cry out of a living mouth. The child is excited with victory; he is bored with conquest. The child is not an Imperialist; the child is a Jingo – which is excellent. The child is not a militarist in the heavy, mechanical modern sense; the child is a fighter. Only very old and very wicked people can be militarists in the modern sense. Only very old and very wicked people can be peace-at-any-price men. The child’s instincts are quite clean and chivalrous, though perhaps a little exaggerated.

But really to talk of this small human creature, who never picks up an umbrella without trying to use it as a sword, who will hardly read a book in which there is no fighting, who out of the Bible itself generally remembers the ‘bluggy’ parts, who never walks down the garden without imagining himself to be stuck all over with swords and daggers – to take this human creature and talk about the wickedness of teaching him to be military, seems rather a wild piece of humour. He has already not only the tradition of fighting, but a far manlier and more genial tradition of fighting than our own. No; I am not in favour of the child being taught militarism. I am in favour of the child teaching it.

- The Illustrated London News, 20 October 1906.

The Queen

This is a picture of the beautiful woman responsible for blessing/genetically rescuing the children whose images you see littered throughout this blog. She is the finest woman I know. Most people are mystified by her decision to consort with likes of me (I include myself in that number), but she does, and I'm keeping her.

Chesterton says that limiting yourself to one woman is a small price to pay for the privilege of being able to see one at all. He was thinking of my wife when he wrote that.

He also had this to say about the "drudgery" of motherhood. It applies equally well:

To be Queen Elizabeth within a definite area, deciding sales, banquets, labors, and holidays; to be Whitely within a certain area, providing toys, sheets, cakes, and books; to be Aristotle within a certain area, teaching morals, manners, theology, and hygiene; I can understand how this might exhaust the mind, but I cannot imagine how it could narrow it. How can it be a large career to tell other people's children about the Rule of Three, and a small career to tell one's own children about the universe? How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone and narrow to be everything to someone? No, a woman's function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
--"The Emancipation of Domesticity" from Chesterton's 1910 classic What's Wrong with the World.

The Defense of Christianity

"You cannot evade the issue of God, whether you talk about pigs or the
binomial theory, you are still talking about Him. Now if Christianity
be. . . a fragment of metaphysical nonsense invented by a few people,
then, of course, defending it will simply mean talking that
metaphysical nonsense over and over. But if Christianity should happen
to be true - then defending it may mean talking about anything or
everything. Things can be irrelevant to the proposition that
Christianity is false, but nothing can be irrelevant to the
proposition that Christianity is true."

G.K. Chesterton
Daily News December 12, 1903