Blessed Boomerang
“Christmas is quite certainly the most interesting thing in England to-day. It is the last living link between all that remains of the most delicate religious devotion and all that exists of the coarsest town vulgarity....The return of old things in new times, by an established and automatic machinery, is the permanent security of men who like to be sane. The greatest of all blessings is the boomerang. And all the healthiest things we know are boomerangs—that is, they are things that return. Sleep is a boomerang. We fling it from us at morning, and it knocks us down again at night. Daylight is a boomerang. We see it at the end of the day disappearing in the distance; and at the beginning of the next day we see it come back and break the sky....The same sort of sensational sanity (truly to be called sensational because it braces and strengthens all the sensations) is given by the return of religious and social festivals. To have such an institution as a Christmas is, I will say not to make an accident inevitable, but I will say to make an adventure recurrent—and therefore, in one sense, to make an adventure everlasting. A practice like that of Christmas is, therefore, much the most practical way of resisting the meaningless modern fancy of perpetually advancing into the white fog of a formless future”. ―G.K. Chesterton, “Christmas Versus the Future,” Illustrated London News, December 20, 1913
No comments:
Post a Comment