What was it Chesterton said of reason? “A madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Speaking of Chesterton, I just finished teaching a class on the man himself, impressing upon a decidedly skeptical class the influence and importance of GKC. We read aloud his two essays "Cheese" and "On Archaeology."

The first delightfully sings the praises of bread and cheese ("nor can I imagine why a man should want more than bread and cheese, if he can get enough of it") and wonders why the ancient poets did not write odes to cheese, especially since it rhymes so well with "breeze" and "seas." He recalls traveling to four English inns and sampling the cheeses native to those regions, and then to "a large and elaborate restaurant" where they gave him cheese cut up into bite-size bits ("contemptibly small pieces") and biscuits. Oh the horror! He had left behind the "true poetic civilisation" of "universal and varied" customs, and entered the "universal and rigid" hell of bad civilisation (biscuits and bad cheese). "I asked [the waiter] if he did not feel, as an artist, that a solid but yielding substance like cheese went naturally with a solid, yielding substance like bread; to eat it off biscuits is like eating it off slates. I asked him if, when he said his prayers, he was so supercilious as to pray for his daily biscuits. He gave me generally to understand that he was only obeying a custom of Modern Society. I have therefore resolved to raise my voice, not against the waiter, but against Modern Society, for this huge and unparalleled modern wrong."

The second sought to deflate the popular misconception that archaeologists and historians are old, dusty, dull, unhappy people, an endeavor I heartily support. While I may be a curmudgeon, I am relatively young, well-kept, moderately entertaining, and quite happy. "I do not know why it should be that a man who studies mummies must himself be a mummy." From this liberation of historians from bad press, he continued on to make some insightful comments on the nature of time and history. Chesterton forcefully argues against the notion that the past is dead, because "the past has moved on living lines; but we can only conceive the future as moving on dead lines -- that is, mechanical lines." The future is merely mathematics and scientific probabilities and statistical analysis, a cold rational place of guessing in round numbers. The past -- a place of "vulgar fractions" -- is "the things left over, the things that do not fit, the things sprawling and struggling." Futurists think the future is x, but in reality they believe that x = 0, or zero, says Chesterton. Think about it. A zero is "round and harmonious and symmetrical, and has a fine inevitable curve; but it is also hollow and blank -- a face without features." Because it cannot account for messy, nasty details of free will that bring features to the face, the future is a dead, enslaved land, pressing on toward necessary but vague destinations.

But history is "full of those free actions and frustrated prophecies. The future can only consist of things expected; it is only the past that consists of things unexpected. Therefore history, and even archaeology, is intrinsically surprising; because it is the study of a story of surprises." What greater advertisement for the study of history can we have than this? What greater warning can there be for those who wish to walk alone on the terribly straight path of the sciences, or who plan utopias far off in the future when humans act as they should? "We may guess some of the fulfillments of a later generation; but we cannot share in any of its surprises. We may know a little about the heritage of our grandchildren, but nothing about their windfalls or their wilder adventures. If we want windfalls and wild adventures, we must consider the ways of our grandfathers and not our grandchildren. If we want the wildest emotions of novelty and astonishment, we can only find them in mouldering stones and fading tapestries, in the museum of antiquities or the place of tombs."

Prithee, make every undergraduate read this essay.