In this week's installment of GKC 15 Minutes at a Time I think about too many things at once. He seems to have that effect on me. But mostly I'm concerned with his patience and humility, with his ability to toss of paradox with the casualty of cliche, and what he actually thinks about nonsense.
When I sit down and start my timer, increasingly, I am finding myself paralyzed for at least a minute or two, as I decide which of the 27 things tumbling in my mind I'd like to explore here. For instance, this grey rainy October morning, I am wondering about Chesterton and Kierkegaard, Chesterton and Plato, and Chesterton and philosophy in general. I am wondering, as his writing reminds me of so many things that I have read, is the Common Man virtue of his writing, in being defiantly "non-scholarly," defiantly NOT like the pompous don he describes in this essay, is really a cleverly crafted facade, that he actually knows far more than he'd be willing to let on, because the weight of it is not what he wants for himself or his reader. I imagine he had spent a great deal of time studying certain things, or else, how could he know and say the things he does? Or else, perhaps, he bears the mark of one gifted with intuitive knowledge, the kind that comes from the habitual intuition of the contemplative.
