Hi friends!
Ok,
ok...our girl hasn't been born yet, and her name will follow in the
train of the heavens and her grandmothers rather than uncle Chesterton,
but I wanted to let you know that we will
not be meeting this month (Feb.) considering that a birthday is soon to arrive.
That doesn't mean that I'll miss an opportunity to throw some Cherster-trivia your way. I picked up an interesting book,
A Year With Chesterton, edited by Kevin Belmont. It features a scripture and two G. K. C. readings per day (about one page of reading).
Today's entry comes from
The New Jerusalem
(1920), the autobiographical book of his travels with Frances (his
wife) through the Holy Lands. He's not as punchy in this work; he's
more reflective, but his voice still rings out clearly. Here is today's
reading:
"He alone spreads out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea."
--Job 9:8
"I descended from the desert train at Ludd, which had all the look of a
large camp in the desert; appropriately enough perhaps, for it is the
traditional birthplace of the soldier St. George....A motor car sent by
friends had halted beside the platform; I got into it with a not unusual
vagueness about where I was going; and it wound its way up miry paths
to a more rolling stretch of country with patches of cactus here and
there. And then with a curious abruptness I became conscious that the
whole huge desert had vanished, and I was in a new land. The dark red
plains had rolled away like an enormous nightmare; and I found myself in
a fresh and exceedingly pleasant dream.
I know it
will seem fanciful; but for a moment I really felt as if I had come
home; or rather to that home behind home for which we are all homesick.
The lost memory of it is the life at once of faith and of fairytale.
Groves glowing with oranges rose behind hedges of grotesque cactus or
prickly pear; which really looked like green dragons guarding the golden
apples of the Hesperides. On each side of the road were such flowers
as I had never seen before under the sun; for indeed they seemed to have
the sun in them rather than the sun on them."
It's
interesting to hear Chesterton talk of coming home in a foreign land
after listening to him laud his native soil so often. And, shrewdly, he
doesn't undo his early praises to continue this new strain.
Well, cheers my friends; please pray for safe passage for our little girl and her glorious mother, Meris,
Schwager
By
Burne-Jones--I think there were supposed to be three daughters tending
the Garden of the Hesperides. And using that Virgin Maryish blue on a
dragon? Leave it to Pre-Raphealite! Maybe a daughter was eaten by the
dragon, explaining her absence and his color change...or maybe she IS
this dragon as the fierce guardian dragon was supposed to have 100
heads. Hiding in the leaves? Bru-ha-ha!
