“BY ONE OF THOSE QUEER [a word that used to mean “strange”] associations that nobody can ever understand, a large number of people have come to think that frivolity has some kind of connection with enjoyment. As a matter of fact, nobody can really enjoy himself unless he is serious.... Men can only enjoy fundamental things. In order to enjoy the lightest and most flying joke a man must be rooted in some basic sense of the good of things; and the good of things means, of course, the seriousness of things…. The really frivolous man, the frivolous man of society, we all know, and any of us who know him truthfully know that if he has one characteristic more salient than another it is that he is a pessimist.... Religion might approximately be defined as the power which makes us joyful about the things that matter. Fashionable frivolity might, with a parallel propriety, be defined as the power which makes us sad about the things that do not matter.”

G.K. Chesterton “The Frivolous Man” reprinted in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22

In my latest Epoch Times column I call the rather vague Wall Street Journal article about a U.S. government report on the COVID lab leak theory very good news because it means the possibility is being debated not cancelled.

“‘Lieutenant, how would you handle this?’ ‘We could try ignoring it, sir.’ ‘I see. Pretend nothing has happened and hope everything turns out all right in the morning?’ ‘Just a thought, sir.’ ‘I’ve considered that. There’s got to be a better angle.’”

Cdr. Buck Murdock (William Shatner) and Lt. Pervis in Airplane 2

“Way back in 1938 Walt Disney had some inspiring words about children’s entertainment: ‘everybody in the world was once a child. So in planning a new picture, we don’t think of grown-ups, and we don’t think of children, but just of that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us that maybe the world has made us forget and that maybe our pictures can help recall.’ Going on a hundred years later, the company which he founded seems to have forgotten about ‘that fine, clean, unspoiled spot down deep in every one of us’.”

Editor Michael Cook’s note in email from Mercatornet April 1, 2022, teasing to a Kurt Mahlburg article.

On retiring he was planning to start reading and contemplating. But while the contemplative life is important “in what sense could one man’s contemplative life take on such grandiose proportions that it could be viewed as ‘for the good of human society’? Most of the ‘solitary contemplatives’ I know these days are pondering stuff a good bit removed from the ‘good of human society.’… It was at this critical log jam in my thinking that my wife earned her keep, signing me up at church for a ‘men’s group.’ I was initially skeptical, to say the least. Participation in such groups has always struck me as something akin to walking on red-hot coals. I have visions of guys dropping all their comfortable, manly gruff and gusto, squeamishly ‘sharing’ stories of personal picadilloes best kept to themselves, just before they completely unman themselves with a torrent of tears. But it didn’t turn out that way at all. This ‘men’s group’ was instead a first cousin to the bookish life – a Shakespeare reading group, where for three years now our little band of brothers has read from the Bard’s best every Sunday night, shouted hearty toasts over ale, and argued ad infinitum (in a very masculine manner), about the meaning of the very masculine life!”

Mark Johnson in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 25 # 4 3-4/22

“My [Houyhnhnm] master … said, a fancy would sometimes take a Yahoo to retire into a corner, to lie down, and howl, and groan, and spurn away all that came near him, although he were young and fat, wanted neither food nor water, nor did the servant imagine what could possibly ail him. And the only remedy they found was, to set him to hard work, after which he would infallibly come to himself. To this I was silent out of partiality to my own kind; yet here I could plainly discover the true seeds of spleen, which only seizes on the lazy, the luxurious, and the rich; who, if they were forced to undergo the same regimen, I would undertake for the cure.”

Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels

In my latest Loonie Politics column I praise John Tory for finding the honour to resign as mayor of Toronto, and mean it the second time, instead of denying that character had any relevance to politics like most of those commenting on the affair or whispering or yelling in his ear

“But my time and labour was little worth, and so it was as well employed one way as another.”

Daniel Defoe Robinson Crusoe