I apologize for the lack of activity in my blog. In a way, this hiatus of sorts reminds me of the incident between Adam Wayne and the shop owner in Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill. In that novel, Wayne visits the owner of a curiosity shop in order to drum up support for the defense of Notting Hill. Since I cannot do justice to the exchange between the two, let me allow Chesterton to do the narration:
"And how does your commerce go, you strange guardian of the past?" said Wayne, affably.
"Well, sir, not very well," replied the man, with that patient voice of his class which is one of the most heart-breaking things in the world. "Things are terribly quiet."
Wayne's eyes shone suddenly.
"A great saying," he said, "worthy of a man whose merchandise is human history. Terribly quiet; that is in two words the spirit of this age, as I have felt it from my cradle. I sometimes wondered how many other people felt the oppression of this union between quietude and terror. I see blank, well-ordered streets and men in black moving about inoffensively, sullenly. It goes on day after day, day after day, and nothing happens; but to me it is like a dream from which I might wake screaming. To me the straightness of our life is the straightness of a thin cord stretched tight. Its stillness is terrible. It might snap with a noise like thunder. And you who sit, amid the debris of the great wars, you who sit, as it were, upon a battle-field, you know that war was less terrible than this evil peace; you know that the idle lads who carried those swords under Francis or Elizabeth, the rude Squire or Baron who swung that mace about in Picardy or Northumberland battles, may have been terribly noisy, but were not like us, terribly quiet."
Of course, the delicious humor of the occasion is based on the premise that whereas Wayne possesses an innocent, childlike sense of wonder precisely because he is a fanatic, "like most children, he may have a sense of fun, but lacks that very adult quality of a sense of humor" (Conlon, 31). Ironically, the very young and idealistic Wayne is too serious to be an adult, in the Chestertonian sense.
Ah, but I digress. It has been terribly quiet in this blog, and I apologize for that. However, much like Adam Wayne, I too am some sort of fanatic, if blessed with the more adult faculty of humor. I'm just finishing some things, and then...well, let's just say that things won't be too terribly quiet around here.
Picture of G.K. Chesterton comes courtesy of G.K. Chesterton in Lithuanian.
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