Reading GK Chesterton and feeling “overwhelmed by an extraordinary sense of happiness”

Published on January 22, 2025 at 11:01 p.m. / Modified on January 22, 2025 at 11:02 p.m.

3 mins. reading

“When we read GK Chesterton (1874-1936), we feel overwhelmed by an extraordinary feeling of happiness. His prose is joyful,” writes Alberto Manguel in his presentation of the essays collected in The Walking Paradox. Any reader of Chesterton remembers feeling this sense of pure wonder. If the sense of detail makes the artist or the writer, for Chesterton the detail is a source of inspiration, it gives birth to the story and gives it all its relief and its moral. The comic in him has this singular characteristic of being taken very seriously – and it is already a “walking paradox”. All these stories express a love of human weaknesses, that is to say the virtue of tolerance, under the guise of great anger – and this is again a paradox.

The author comes to the defense of penny novels: “As long as the thin and rough texture of the popular sentimental novel is not contaminated by poor culture, it will never be intrinsically trivial”; of razors: “Nowadays, universal opinion is that the unforgivable sin is to be a razor. This is a serious mistake. The unforgivable sin is having a beard, it’s boring. Taking into account the weaknesses of humanity, we can authorize revolutions, emancipation, and grant him the right to break his chains. But the strong, ideal man, the superman, would sit at the feet of his grandmother.”

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