I happened to dedicate to Mr. Bentley, in those distant days, a book called “The Man Who Was Thursday”; it was a very melodramatic sort of moonshine, but it had a kind of notion in it; and the point is that it described, first a band of the last champions of order fighting against what appeared to be a world of anarchy; and then the discovery that the mysterious master both of the anarchy and the order was the same sort of elemental elf; who had appeared to be rather too like a pantomime ogre. This line of logic, or lunacy, led many to infer that this equivocal being was meant for a serious description of the Deity; and my work even enjoyed a temporary respect among those who like the Deity to be so described. But this error was entirely due to the same cause; that they had read the book but had not read the title-page. In my case, it is true, it was a question of a sub-title rather than a title. The book was called “The Man Who Was Thursday: a Nightmare.” It was not intended to describe the real world as it was, or as I thought it was, even when my thoughts were considerably less settled than they are now. It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date; with just a gleam of hope in some double meaning of the doubt, which even the pessimists felt in some fitful fashion.
G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London Times, June 13, 1936
I’m reading above my pay grade again, as I sometimes do; but how else to increase one’s pay grade by stretching beyond its limits? I’ve found numerous sources to help me with this book, and hope that somewhere I’ve stumbled into something that is close to accurate. But this post is mostly a marker, or a seed, which further reading may modify or expand. As such, it’s more of a collection of information about the book, part draft for a high school term paper, part reader’s diary; it’s unlikely to interest casual readers. For those wondering if they would enjoy reading the book, there are numerous reviews (by actual professionals who know how to review) available online; for those looking for answers to homework questions, I don’t guarantee the academic acceptability of anything here, so I suggest you look elsewhere. I’m assuming familiarity with the book, and not worrying about spoilers. You’ve been warned!
(That should get rid of just about everyone; now I can get to work)
It’s a book by an author whose basic beliefs – conservativism, the superiority of Christianity over any secular interpretation of morality, and as an objective and absolute source of order and authority – are contrary to my own general leanings. So why would I read such a book? I read a great many things to get a sense of the roadmap, not to adopt as my personal creed. But mostly, I kept running into this book and author.
First (that I clearly recall, at any rate) was this past March, when I was reading Lewis Carroll and the Alice books. The edition of Wonderland and Looking Glass was annotated by Martin Gardner, who included this note in his introduction:
The vision of monstrous mindlessness of the cosmos (“Off with its head!”) can be grim and disturbing, as it is in Kafka and the Book of Job, or light-hearted comedy, as in Alice or Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday…. it is a vision that can lead to despair and suicide, to the laughter that closes Jean Paul Sarte’s story “The Wall,” to the humanist’s resolve to carry on bravely in the face of ultimate darkness. Curiously, it can also suggest the wild hypothesis that there may be a light behind the darkness.
Martin Gardner, Introduction, The Annotated Alice
Chesterton’s name and the book’s title seemed vaguely familiar to me. I gave them a casual google, didn’t see anything I recognized, but it stuck with me: something connecting Kafka, Job, and Alice might be worth reading. The “light behind the darkness” comment sounded a lot like something I might have heard in a mooc on existentialism. But I was busy, I had a pile of books to read already, so I plugged on.
A few days later, a professor from a philosophy mooc I took (I follow as many of my mooc professors as I can find) tweeted a reference to the same book, comparing Jordan Peterson to the Philosophical Policeman. I had no idea what this meant – I know very little about Peterson and knew nothing at the time about the character being referenced – but it occurred to me, frequency illusion be damned, that the universe might be telling me I should read this book. I ordered a used copy, a random edition, and put it on my TBR shelf, not sure if I’d get to it this year or not.
Then yet another former mooc professor mentioned the book in passing, as one of the many books he’d used as a kind of “warm up” in his 8 am classes. His description: “philosophical spy novel about bomb-throwing anarchists. seriously hilarious.” Apparently his students really took to this particular warm-up. His description tickled me so I moved it to “next up.”
For such a short book – 143 pages in the Wordsworth Classics edition (it’s in the public domain, so editions abound, including online text and audio) – it took a lot of reading. I’ve been obsessed with it, reading it over and over – four, five, six times at least – as well as reading about it, for three weeks now. There’s a lot in the small details. For example, I’d initially considered the first chapter to be rather unimportant, a scene-setter, but over time I started to see phrases and moments that made it far more important than I’d originally thought.
I found a reference to a poem that preceded the text, a poem that was annoyingly omitted from the edition I’d bought. While hunting down that poem, I discovered another edition of the book is annotated by – guess who, Martin Gardner. I ordered that edition, and found a wealth of material that helped me better understand what was going on. The footnotes are mostly information on the London and language of Chesterton’s day, but there are a few gems, and the Introduction and Appendix are excellent resources.
(Is she ever going to get to the book, you wonder? I warned you – this is more of a personal diary entry than a post aimed at the public, but yes, she is).
This particular evening, if it is remembered for nothing else, will be remembered in that place for its strange sunset. It looked like the end of the world. All the heaven seemed covered with a quite vivid and palpable plumage; you could only say that the sky was full of feathers, and of feathers that almost brushed the face. Across the great part of the dome they were grey, with the strangest tints of violet and mauve and an unnatural pink or pale green; but towards the west the whole grew past description, transparent and passionate, and the last red-hot plumes of it covered up the sun like something too good to be seen. The whole was so close about the earth, as to express nothing but a violent secrecy. The very empyrean seemed to be a secret. It expressed that splendid smallness which is the soul of local patriotism. The very sky seemed small.
I say that there are some inhabitants who may remember the evening if only by that oppressive sky. There are others who may remember it because it marked the first appearance in the place of the second poet of Saffron Park. For a long time the red-haired revolutionary had reigned without a rival; it was upon the night of the sunset that his solitude suddenly ended. The new poet, who introduced himself by the name of Gabriel Syme was a very mild-looking mortal, with a fair, pointed beard and faint, yellow hair. But an impression grew that he was less meek than he looked. He signalised his entrance by differing with the established poet, Gregory, upon the whole nature of poetry. He said that he (Syme) was poet of law, a poet of order; nay, he said he was a poet of respectability. So all the Saffron Parkers looked at him as if he had that moment fallen out of that impossible sky.
In fact, Mr. Lucian Gregory, the anarchic poet, connected the two events.
One of the (many) disadvantages I faced going into this book was a lack of knowledge of the period Chesterton was reacting to: the very late 19th and very early 20th centuries in Great Britain. Some of the materials in Gardner’s annotations helped, but not much. It’s tempting to map this onto the period of my own lifetime, which began in an era of conformity before exploding into controversy and what many saw as degeneracy and a see-saw between the two that has been playing out for the past half-century, but I’m not competent to do that.
That leaves me, for the moment, with the discussion of poetry in the opening chapter: is poetry a force of order, or chaos? This is what I saw, in my first read, as the primary conflict of the book: the established order vs modernity. Modernity is a tricky term. In different contexts it can refer to anything from the 17th to the 20th century. Since poetry is the specific vehicle, and since modern poetry, which moved beyond common forms, themes, and viewpoints in favor of a more subjective art under the banner “Make it New”, was in its nascent form at the time Chesterton wrote the book (it wouldn’t fully emerge for a couple of decades) I used that as an anchor. It’s also interesting that at one point in the book the point-of-view character, Syme, also brings in art: “He had found the thing which the modern people call Impressionism, which is another name for that final scepticism which can find no floor to the universe.” I would think post-impressionism would be more germane both thematically and temporally, but again, I’m tap dancing way above my head here.
The point is, I focused on a reaction to a period of frightening transition from order – social, political, religious – to chaos, as seen by a devotee of order.
It gets much more serious than that, however, when Syme asks his new anarchist poet friend just what he wants:
“First of all, what is it really all about? What is it you object to? You want to abolish Government?”
“To abolish God!” said Gregory, opening the eyes of a fanatic. “We do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.”
By the end of the book (and after a couple of readings), it becomes apparent that the names are important here: Gabriel Syme, and Lucien Gregory. Gabriel is the name of one of the archangels, considered a messenger of God; Lucien is interestingly close to Lucifer, the fallen angel, Satan. This is about more than poetry or post-impressionism, or even the more general order and chaos.
An overall idea that struck me after first read is the change that comes over the Council during the course of the book. At the first meeting, it’s a group of (supposed) anarchists: the goal is destruction. The final time they come together at the very end of the book, they are dressed as the days of Creation. That they were never truly about destruction, but each at first believed he might be the only one trying to prevent it, might be one of the points that Chesterton makes in an article he wrote years after writing the book:
Mind you, I think it is well that we should not know all about those around us, that we should fight in the dark, while having the faith that most men are on the right side, for to possess courage the soul of man must be lonely until at last it knows all.
G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated Sunday Herald, January 24th, 1926
One thing (hah, of many) that puzzles me about this initial chapter is the question of where the dream starts. Is it intended that from word one we are in Syme’s dream? The sunset I quoted earlier certainly seems like it might be part of a dream. But a few pages later there’s another spot that seems quite likely as a starting place for a dream: Syme has just met Gregory’s sister, Rosamond, and spends time chatting with her:
Syme strolled with her to a seat in the corner of the garden, and continued to pour out his opinions… He stared and talked at the girl’s red hair and amused face for what seemed to be a few minutes; and then, feeling that the groups in such a place should mix, rose to his feet. To his astonishment, he discovered the whole garden empty. Everyone had gone long ago, and he went himself with a rather hurried apology. He left with a sense of champagne in his head, which he could not afterwards explain. In the wild events which were to follow this girl had no part at all; he never saw her again until all his tale was over. And yet, in some indescribable way, she kept recurring like a motive in music through all his mad adventures afterwards, and the glory of her strange hair ran like a red thread through those dark and ill-drawn tapestries of the night. For what followed was so improbable, that it might well have been a dream.
I missed this the first several times I read it, probably because I wasn’t paying proper attention, but it does seem like an appropriate break to start the dream. I also missed how the color red is indeed woven through the book, mostly in skies. In his note, Gardner puts forth the idea that Rosamond is a stand-in for Chesterton’s wife Frances, as Syme is for Chesterton himself. It seems Chesterton met his wife in Bedford Park, which in the book becomes Saffron Park.
It’s evident that Syme is interested in Rosamond. She is the final vision of the book: “There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.” I confess I have no idea what the “great unconscious gravity” is, but it’s a nice phrase. It’s amusing that a book about order and chaos and God and Nature ends as a love story. I do find it odd that Rosamond would be the sister of Lucien, whom Chesterton described bluntly as the only villain of the piece. But he is merely a poet with pretentions of anarchy before the dream, and only becomes a villain in the dream itself; perhaps that is the way to reconcile it.
The next twelve chapters are the main action of the book, and surprisingly, for all the talk of art and God and anarchy, suddenly it’s a hilarious page-turner. Lucien takes Syme to a meeting of the local Anarchists Council (and yes, there’s some irony to anarchists being so organized) on the promise that he won’t reveal anything to anyone. Just as they’re about to go in, Syme casually mentions, “I am a police detective.” But he reassures Lucien:
“Don’t you see we’ve checkmated each other?” cried Syme. “I can’t tell the police you are an anarchist. You can’t tell the anarchists I’m a policeman. I can only watch you, knowing what you are; you can only watch me, knowing what I am. In short, it’s a lonely, intellectual duel, my head against yours. I’m a policeman deprived of the help of the police. You, my poor fellow, are an anarchist deprived of the help of that law and organisation which is so essential to anarchy. The one solitary difference is in your favour. You are not surrounded by inquisitive policemen; I am surrounded by inquisitive anarchists. I cannot betray you, but I might betray myself.
These folks take their promises seriously, it seems. Suspend some disbelief.
What follows is a jolly good time as the six members of the Council, headed by the President, Sunday, find out one by one that they are all police detectives, recruited by a Philosophical Policeman and approved by a Man in a Dark Room, infiltrating an organization of anarchists where there are no actual anarchists. The wonderful motif of each member bringing out his blue card – received when accepted into the detective’s division and sent undercover – repeats over and over, until with the last reveal, one member exposed earlier shows how routine it’s become: “’Oh, don’t show it us,’ he said wearily; ‘we’ve got enough of them to equip a paper-chase.’”
One of the difficulties I had with the first couple of reads was keeping the six characters straight. They all have code names of the days of the week; then they have their common names, which may be fictitious, so some have real names as well. I ended up making a chart, albeit in text form, so I could remember that the Marquis is Wednesday but he’s actually Inspector Ratcliffe, and Professor de Worms is Friday though he’s really an actor named Wilkes who has been impersonating the actual German nihilist Prof. De Worms for so long, he’s regarded as the authentic one so his given name is never used.
I also included in this chart the physical oddities each member exhibited, a features Syme notes at the first meeting of the Council:
He had thought at first that they were all of common stature and costume, with the evident exception of the hairy Gogol. But as he looked at the others, he began to see in each of them exactly what he had seen in the man by the river, a demoniac detail somewhere. That lop-sided laugh, which would suddenly disfigure the fine face of his original guide, was typical of all these types. Each man had something about him, perceived perhaps at the tenth or twentieth glance, which was not normal, and which seemed hardly human. The only metaphor he could think of was this, that they all looked as men of fashion and presence would look, with the additional twist given in a false and curved mirror.
The Secretary has an uneven smile; Gogol is wildly hairy; Bull wears black glasses that give him a sinister cast; the Professor is extremely old and debilitated; the Marquis has exceptionally dark black hair. With the exception of the Secretary, all of these are disguises, but they are distinguishing characteristics that play into the revelation that each is a detective.
I also included in this chart the characters’ impressions of Sunday, the messages he tosses them as he leads them in a merry chase, and their last comments to him. I haven’t been able to construct any information from this data, but putting it together was helpful in distinguishing each person.
And oh, the chases! Three hilarious episodes, each one showing an escalation within, while the three scenes separately show an escalation of absurdity and urgency. When Lit101 professors talk about narrative drive, this is what they mean: you have to keep reading to see how each one turns out, then to see what happens next.
The first chase occurs after the first meeting at which Gogol was exposed as a detective by Sunday himself, leaving Syme (and, unknown to him, the others as well) relieved that he is still, for the moment, undetected. Syme goes to a pub and notices the ancient Professor is there, drinking a glass of milk. Syme is worried that Sunday may be having him followed, so he leaves and goes to a café, where… the Professor shows up again. Syme is surprised, since the man is so old (how can he get from place to place so fast?) but he did dawdle a bit, so he runs to yet another establishment – only to find the Professor joins him again! Now he dashes out in the snow, takes a roundabout route to an autobus, and guess who turns up. By the time Syme corners the old man in an alley, he’s convinced his life is in danger, but the Professor takes out his blue card…
The second chase is far more elaborate. I won’t even try to describe it except to say both the chasee and the chaser expand in numbers and transportation in a kind of arms race. It both begins and ends with the showing of a blue card, and the line between anarchists and detectives keeps switching back and forth, depending on who you’re asking and when you’re asking them. It’s delightful. And yet there’s thematic import as well, in the form of an antique lantern.
The third chase begins with the six confronting Sunday, who is still a mystery. Is he an anarchist? Does he know they are detectives? Just what is going on with this Anarchist Council that contains no anarchists? Sunday gives his first oration:
…“As far as I can make out, you want me to tell you what I am, and what you are, and what this table is, and what this Council is, and what this world is for all I know. Well, I will go so far as to rend the veil of one mystery. If you want to know what you are, you are a set of highly well-intentioned young jackasses.”
“And you,” said Syme, leaning forward, “what are you?”
“I? What am I?” roared the President, and he rose slowly to an incredible height, like some enormous wave about to arch above them and break. “You want to know what I am, do you? Bull, you are a man of science. Grub in the roots of those trees and find out the truth about them. Syme, you are a poet. Stare at those morning clouds. But I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am. Since the beginning of the world all men have hunted me like a wolf—kings and sages, and poets and lawgivers, all the churches, and all the philosophies. But I have never been caught yet, and the skies will fall in the time I turn to bay. I have given them a good run for their money, and I will now.”
…“There’s one thing I’ll tell you though about who I am. I am the man in the dark room, who made you all policemen.”
With this, Sunday hops over the balcony – no small feat for such a big man – and we have a chase that includes a cart, a fire truck, an elephant, and a hot-air balloon, all from which Sunday throws senseless messages for each detective. The chase ends in a field where an agent is waiting with six elegant carriages to take the anarchists-turned-detectives to a party at a large estate: “They had all become inured to things going roughly; but things suddenly going smoothly swamped them.”
This begins what I think of as the third part of the book. I wouldn’t say questions are answered, but the questions themselves clarify the purpose of it all. The detectives are given costumes representing the days of creation, and as the party winds down, the text turns reminiscent of the Book of Job. They confront Sunday with their complaints and he answers without answering. I’d just read a bit about Job a few weeks ago when I read Jack Miles’ God: A Biography, and the similarity struck me immediately; I was gratified to find out I wasn’t wrong. But it’s confusing; Chesterton has insisted that Sunday is not God, so who is this bombast talking to the philosophers, Job, and, eventually, Satan?
“We will eat and drink later,” he said. “Let us remain together a little, we who have loved each other so sadly, and have fought so long. I seem to remember only centuries of heroic war, in which you were always heroes—epic on epic, iliad on iliad, and you always brothers in arms. Whether it was but recently (for time is nothing), or at the beginning of the world, I sent you out to war. I sat in the darkness, where there is not any created thing, and to you I was only a voice commanding valour and an unnatural virtue. You heard the voice in the dark, and you never heard it again. The sun in heaven denied it, the earth and sky denied it, all human wisdom denied it. And when I met you in the daylight I denied it myself.”
Syme stirred sharply in his seat, but otherwise there was silence, and the incomprehensible went on.
“But you were men. You did not forget your secret honour, though the whole cosmos turned an engine of torture to tear it out of you. I knew how near you were to hell. I know how you, Thursday, crossed swords with King Satan, and how you, Wednesday, named me in the hour without hope.”
There was complete silence in the starlit garden, and then the black-browed Secretary, implacable, turned in his chair towards Sunday, and said in a harsh voice—
“Who and what are you?”
“I am the Sabbath,” said the other without moving. “I am the peace of God.”
The detectives have one last shot to speak. The Secretary is still angry; Gogol wants to know why he was hurt so badly, which strikes me as incredibly sweet and sad; and Syme just wants to know:
I do not feel fierce like that. I am grateful to you, not only for wine and hospitality here, but for many a fine scamper and free fight. But I should like to know. My soul and heart are as happy and quiet here as this old garden, but my reason is still crying out. I should like to know.”
I’m not sure how to read that. This is the poet, and the voice of reason? The human quest to understand that which is inexplicable? A pre-leap Kierkegaardian view, the attempt to justify faith through rationality? Or is he answered when he wakes and finds himself watching Rosamond gather lilacs? In any case, it’s an urge I sympathize with, as someone whose capacity for understanding is often not equal to the desire to understand.
Importantly, Lucien Gregory shows up. The title of this final chapter is “The Accuser” which I have discovered is a literal translation of “Satan.” He argues with God and with Syme, accusing all seven of never having suffered. Syme answers that – “We were complaining of unforgettable miseries even at the very moment when this man entered insolently to accuse us of happiness” – then asks Sunday, “Have you ever suffered?” Sunday has an answer for that: “Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?” This was Jesus’ question to his disciples when they promised to be loyal, not realizing what a serious commitment that would be. This brings me back to the scene where Syme meets the Man in the Dark Room – who, it turns out, is Sunday – to apply for his position as detective of anarchy:
“Are you the new recruit?” said the invisible chief, who seemed to have heard all about it. “All right. You are engaged.”
Syme, quite swept off his feet, made a feeble fight against this irrevocable phrase.
“I really have no experience,” he began.
“No one has any experience,” said the other, “of the Battle of Armageddon.”
“But I am really unfit—”
“You are willing, that is enough,” said the unknown.
“Well, really,” said Syme, “I don’t know any profession of which mere willingness is the final test.”
“I do,” said the other—“martyrs. I am condemning you to death. Good day.”
It’s an interesting answer to the question of suffering, one I’m not equipped to analyze beyond the obvious connections.
And then Syme wakes up, or rather comes to in Saffron Park in the morning: “He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.” Those of us who misspent our youth in Sunday schools recognize that ‘good news’ is the literal translation of ‘gospel.’ The phrase is used one other time in the text, when Bull gives his impression, as they all do in turn during the balloon chase, of his first meeting with Sunday:
“And somehow,” concluded Bull, “that’s why I can’t help liking old Sunday. No, it’s not an admiration of force, or any silly thing like that. There is a kind of gaiety in the thing, as if he were bursting with some good news. Haven’t you sometimes felt it on a spring day? You know Nature plays tricks, but somehow that day proves they are good-natured tricks. I never read the Bible myself, but that part they laugh at is literal truth, ‘Why leap ye, ye high hills?’ The hills do leap—at least, they try to…. Why do I like Sunday?… how can I tell you?… because he’s such a Bounder.”
One insignificant detail I found interesting is that reference to leaping hills. It turns out the KJV is the verse quoted here, but other translations use different verbs that convey the hills not leaping, but looking with envy on Jerusalem as the site of God’s temple, and the psalmist telling them to knock it off because that is what God wants. Maybe that’s a sign that Bull indeed doesn’t read the Bible (interesting though that he has that obscure verse ready) or maybe it’s just the traditional reading and I’m being a fussbudget.
Here, in this third and far more philosophical part of the book, I found I needed more help. It turns out there are many opinions. A lot of people teaching this as part of religious education stick to Sunday as God, though, let’s remind ourselves again, Chesterton said several times over a couple of decades that was not his intent (oh, yes, let’s keep in mind Death of the Author, shall we). I’ll admit, it makes the most sense to me, first, because of the entire Job scene: who else would argue with man and Satan about suffering? But I’m also interested in the idea of Sunday being seen as evil and foreboding from the back, but benevolent from the front. I keep thinking of that as having God’s back to one, that is, rejecting God, and finding evil in his absence.
But Martin Gardner has a different idea, one that I like as well, and obviously one from a far more educated place than I can claim. First he deals with the overall conflict, which I kept seeing as a world shifting from Order to Chaos (or what would seem like Chaos to those fond of the existing Order; it might seem like liberation to those who are oppressed by Order, hmmm?):
In Chesterton’s comic fantasy, which he calls on the title page “A Nightmare,” free will is symbolized by anarchism. Man’s freedom to do wicked things, as Augustine and so many other theologians of all faiths have said, is the price we pay for freedom. If our behavior were entirely determined by how our brain is wired by heredity and environment, then we would anymore mere autonomous automatons with no more genuine free will or self-awareness – two names for the same thing – than a vacuum cleaner. But we are not automatons. We have a knowledge of good and evil and of freedom to choose, within limits, of course, between the two.
Martin Gardner, Introduction, The Man Who Was Thursday
This is the argument for an external morality imposed by a Deity, or in other interpretations, Tradition, or Law. The view is that people are simply not capable of being moral on their own, and morality must come from somewhere else. We can play with the idea that deities, traditions, and laws are generated by people and become external over time (yes, as a Deist-leaning agnostic with persistent echoes of Christianity from a misspent youth as a fundamentalist and a more recently-developed fondness for certain aspects of Daoism and Buddhism, I’m more of the man-created-God school than the God-created-man one) or we can discard law and tradition and that leaves the Deity as the only source of morality.
Then Gardner goes in another interesting direction, the indifference of Nature, tempered by a loving Deity:
…And this takes us to the other deep mystery of Chesterton’s nightmare, the mystery of natural evil. Of course, this is no mystery for an atheist. It’s just the way the world is. But for a theist of any faith it is the most terrifying of all riddles. How can an all-powerful, benevolent God permit so much needless pain? As Gogol asks Sunday, like a small child questioning his mother, “I wish I knew why I was hurt so much.”
…The only possible way a theist can escape from the atheist’s charge – either God is malevolent or there is no God – is to view Nature as the back of reality. Beyond what Lord Dunsany liked to call “the fields we know” there is a larger, wholly other unseen realm. Logic cannot prove its existence, and science is helpless in efforts to penetrate it, but by a leap of faith we can escape despair by looking forward to a life beyond the grave where God will in some manner, utterly beyond our understanding, rectify the mad injustices of the fields we know. This is the great hope that glows at the heart of theism and at the core of Chesterton’s melodrama.
…Sunday, like Nature, has a front and a back side. From the back he resembles what Chesterton calls in The Uses Of Diversity (Chap. 9) a “semi-supernatural monster.” From the front he looks like an angel. Nature lavishes on us a thousand gifts that make us happy and grateful to be alive, yet the same nature can destroy entire cities with seemingly random earthquakes. It can drown us with floods, kill us with tornadoes and diseases. Ultimately it will execute us.
Martin Gardner, Introduction, The Man Who Was Thursday
I’m not 100% sure I understand what’s being claimed here, but the general drift intrigues me. What has always intrigued me is how hard theists work to make excuses for God. Or, more accurately, to justify their particular vision of God.
Gardner has some other interesting insights. One that puzzles me: he seems to think the party is a ‘dream within a dream.’ I don’t know how he gets that; it’s probably in the text somewhere, and maybe the seventh or eighth time I read it, I’ll find it.
One of his most delightful, if slightly off-topic, footnotes involves a sketch by Chesterton showing eight characters from Thursday.
He went to great pains to identify them, admitting “their appearances are not wholly consistent with their descriptions in the novel.” Apparently, if you have a first edition of Gardner’s book, this is all you get. Those of us who came late to the game get the following addition:
After writing the above note for this book first printing, I was informed by John Peterson that Tony Evans had concocted a playful hoax. Maisie Ward, in her book Return to Chesterton, opposite page 180, reproduced a sketch by GK that he had made of ten imaginary suitors seeking the hand of a young woman he knew. Evans removed two of the men, then rearranged the remaining eight to resemble characters from Thursday!
Martin Gardner, footnote, The Man Who Was Thursday
I love that he includes his original comments with this explanation/retraction rather than just eliminating it all from future editions. As to the original hoax, I’m still not sure of the extent of the foul, but it seems pretty foul to me.
It’s time for me to move on, at least for now. I’ve probably spent more time, page for page, on this book than any other that I’ve posted about here (and it was worth every minute). I spent months on Don Quixote, ditto with Dante, and quite a while on Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, but those were much longer books to begin with. I might have come close with Jo Walton’s Lent, but again, that was longer.
I thoroughly enjoyed the combination of narrative, humor, and thought that was involved here. I still have some things to figure out, but when I run across references in the future, I’ll come back and, I hope, come closer to understanding the book.
A Just Recompense 