G.K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday and Seven Suspects

I have already said much that I have to say about Chesterton in general upon reading Selected Father Brown Stories, to wit: That he is a much better philospher than detective writer. The books are filled with little errors in judgement, of the sort that one sees in amateurish Hollywood blockbusters---nothing terrible, just occassionally forgetting to tell us something, or omitting some detail that would have made the scene easier to track. Jarring at most, as if the cinematographer had mistaken the line of sight and confused the audience about who was speaking to whom for a moment.

As I have mentioned elsewhere, it is just as well that his prose is not airtight, for his stories are never really detective stories at all. They are always philisophical, almost religious, in bent, and the crime is mere bait or frosting, depending on his intent. I had forgotten this as I began to read The Man Who Was Thursday, so it was only natural that his implausible dialogue, his seeming misrememberance of earlier established facts, were vexing at first. It was only after I remembered that it is folly to read Chesterton as fiction that I began to truly enjoy this remarkable novella. What he offers is not a detective story at all, but an allegory that offers all the pleasures of allegory--the fine, confluent detail, the overlapping and interlocking symbolism--without much of its didacticism. I can't help but feel that it would have been better undisguised.

The stories in Seven Suspects are a little more passable, and one could almost overlook the mysticism if careless. After reading Thursday, however, my pump was primed, and I sought it everywhere. Nor was I dissapointed. A passage that still brings chills, even upon multiple readings:

Do you remember when we last met at that theatre and I told you that I always liked the picture on the curtain as much as the scenes of the play. . . from any other angle I should see that it was only a painted rag. That is how I feel about this world, as i see it from this mountain. Not that it is not beautiful, for after all a curtain can be beautiful. Not even that it is unreal, for after all a curtain is real. But only that it is thin, and that the things behind it are the real drama" (The Tower of Treason).

How perfectly this parallels my own thinking lately. Taken literally, all that we seem to perceive is but a trick of light. The space between particles of matter is so much exponentially bigger than the matter itself, we may as well be looking at an image projected onto a cloud or water vapor. And if we allow it to, the light is constantly altering what we seem to see, as a shadow falls across it, or as our eyes change their focus, or as the light itself changes. Every visual image we have is quite literally a trick of the light, an optical illusion. It has no reality, and is rather more like Chesterton's theater curtain than anything else. Better yet, perhaps it is more like a scrim, that peculiar sort of theater screen that is opaque when lit from the front, but translucent lit from behind. If the light hits it just right, all that we seem to perceive could instantly disappear to reveal something else, something that may or may not be more real, but would at least be different.

Catching up . . .

Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale

It has been so long since I updated this blog, due to a combination of computer failure and motivation failure, that I have forgotten most of what I meant to say about this book. To remind myself what I thought, I went back to see what pages were dogeared, and found only one. Not surprisingly, it was the most meta passage in the book:

"This is a reconsctruction. All of it is a reconstruction. It's a reconstruction now, in my head, as I lie flat on my single bed rehearsing what I should or shouldn't have said, what I should or shouldn't have done, how I should have played it."

Atwood's narrator further bemoans the difficulty of ever communicating events as they really happened. No matter what, our stories are always many times removed from reality--and perhaps removed the furthest by our own capacity to edit.

I myself am fascinated by this phenomenon, though unlike Atwood's narrator, I don't regret the fact. I relish my editorial post in this life--the trick is not to believe your own story, to be cognizant of its inherent falsehood. The future is a lie. It will never happen. It is fine to lie alone in our beds and write stories about it, but we must never make the mistake of believing those stories, building expectations or anxieties. The past, too, may well have never happened. It most certainly did not happen the way we remember it. We lay in our solitude and return, replay, regret, but it is never more than an illusion projected onto a cloud.

Which brings me to:

Robert Schwartz: Courageous Souls

Recommended to me by my dear friend 주협, this book did not disappoint. The above reminders inspired by Atwood, are an especially appropriate framework in which to discuss it for two reasons: firstly, the central idea is that our stories are one step further removed from reality than Atwood implied: that every event upon which our stories were based is in fact an expression of something unseen, something that happened before we were born even. The way in which the author outlines that idea is rather involved, and I will not go into it here. He does a good job of outlining it, but it is important to remember that this too, is just a story. It is a story about stories, in fact, about how we construct and conceal them. It is helpful, and even healing to read, but it would be a mistake to take it as reality.

C.S. Forester: Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

I can't find a single dogeared page in this book, so I guess there was no particular passage that I wanted to remember or quote verbatim. Instead, I want to read every other volume in the series. It was fresh and engaging, serious without being ponderous, exactly the sort of thing I should read more of.