Words Worth Noting - December 4, 2024

“IF I WERE ASKED why I think our whole industrial society is cursed with sterility and stamped with the mark of the slave, I could give a great many answers, but one will serve for the moment: because it cannot create a custom. It can only create a fashion. Now a fashion is simply something that has failed to be a custom. It is changed as a fashion because it is a failure as a custom. The rich, who are the most restless of mankind, do one thing after another, and prove in the very process that they cannot create anything that is good enough to last. Their succession of fashions is in itself a succession of failures. For when men have made really dignified and humane things they have always desired that they should remain; or, at least, that some relic of them should remain. We have statues of all schools of statuary and buildings of all periods of architecture. But fashion, in the feverish sense that exists to-day, is a totally different thing, a merely destructive thing; indeed, an entirely negative thing. It is as if a man were perpetually carving a statue and smashing it as soon as he carved it; as if he were always clumsily fumbling with the clay and had never modelled it to his liking. It is as if people began to dig up the foundations of a house before they had finished putting the roof on... ”

G.K. Chesterton “Poetry in Action” reprinted in Gilbert The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 26 # 2 (Nov.-Dec. 2022) p. 6 [including start]