Tremendous Trifles. Гилберт Кит Честертон

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       G. K. Chesterton

      Tremendous Trifles

      Published by Good Press, 2019

       [email protected]

      EAN 4057664173140

Table of Contents

       PREFACE

       I. Tremendous Trifles

       II. A Piece of Chalk

       III. The Secret of a Train

       IV. The Perfect Game

       V. The Extraordinary Cabman

       VI. An Accident

       VII. The Advantages of Having One Leg

       VIII. The End of the World

       IX. In the Place de La Bastille

       X. On Lying in Bed

       XI. The Twelve Men

       XII. The Wind and the Trees

       XIII. The Dickensian

       XIV. In Topsy-Turvy Land

       XV. What I Found in My Pocket

       XVI. The Dragon's Grandmother

       XVII. The Red Angel

       XVIII. The Tower

       XIX. How I Met the President

       XX. The Giant

       XXI. A Great Man

       XXII. The Orthodox Barber

       XXIII. The Toy Theatre

       XXIV. A Tragedy of Twopence

       XXV. A Cab Ride Across Country

       XXVI. The Two Noises

       XXVII. Some Policemen and a Moral

       XXVIII. The Lion

       XXIX. Humanity: an Interlude

       XXX. The Little Birds Who Won't Sing

       XXXI. The Riddle of the Ivy

       XXXII. The Travellers in State

       XXXIII. The Prehistoric Railway Station

       XXXIV. The Diabolist

       XXXV. A Glimpse of My Country

       XXXVI. A Somewhat Improbable Story

       XXXVII. The Shop Of Ghosts

       XXXVIII. The Ballade of a Strange Town

       XXXIX. The Mystery of a Pageant

PREFACE

       Table of Contents

      These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission of the Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared. They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary—a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy—the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep. Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as “The Bed-Post; Its Significance—Security Essential to Idea of Sleep—Night Felt as Infinite—Need of Monumental Architecture,” and so on. He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary. “The Window-Blind—Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil—Is Modesty Natural?—Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc.” None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests. But don't let us let the eye rest. Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence. Let us be ocular athletes. Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud. I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try.