“Why does the perfect social state always seem to be a state of perfect boredom stiffened only by self-righteousness?”
G.K. Chesterton in London Magazine August 1924, quoted in “Why Do You Ask Me Rhetorical Questions? 6” in Gilbert: The Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 27 #2 (November/December 2023)
“Perhaps, the new intellectual world was really inaugurated when Oscar Wilde said about Bernard Shaw: ‘He has no enemies; but he is intensely disliked by all his friends.’”
G.K. Chesterton in “Peculiar Peace-Makers” in The New York American March 25, 1933, reprinted in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #2 (Nov./Dec. 2024)
On the 9th Hour podcast I joined theatre artist Breanna Doyle and host Charley to discuss heroes and villains in history, finding truth among shifting interpretations, and what it means for us today.
“As the myth of inevitable victory fragmented, the fragments became new, even larger, even brighter, myths. In a prolific spasm, illusion gave birth to a host of illusions. Horror was turned into spiritual fulfillment. War became peace. Death, life. Annihilation, freedom. Machine, poetry. Amorality, truth. Over eighteen thousand church bells and innumerable organ pipes were donated to the war effort, to be melted down and used for arms and ammunition. As the assault on the physical and social fixities of the nineteenth-century bourgeois world was intensified the resulting sensation was one of growing liberation from constraint, frontiers, forms. The promotion of this liberation continue to be the most important component of Pflicht. This association of death with life was a re-enactment, writ large, of the sacrificial sequence of Le Sacre du Printemps.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The Flat-Earthers may come into fashion, as promising leaders of the march of progress. Their party is small, perverse, unpopular, and probably wrong; and that seems to be all that is required to make a modern minority promising and progressive.”
G.K. Chesterton in Everyweek September 26, 1918, quoted in “Chesterton for Today” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #4 (March/April 2025)
“The poet Rainer Maria Rilke and many others bowed in humble and awed obeisance to the ‘War God.’ Und wir? Glühen in Eines zusammen,/ In ein neues Geschöpf, das er tödlich belebt.* [“*And we? We glow as One/ A new creature invigorated by death.”] Invigoration by death: such was Germany's ‘rite of spring.’”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era
“The first impulse of an enlightened person on hearing the proposal to broadcast the debates of Parliament is merely that it is one of the typical triumphs of modern science. It is telling us that everybody can listen to what nobody wants to hear.”
G.K. Chesterton in Illustrated London News April 5, 1925, quoted in “Radio (and TV and Movies)” in Gilbert: the Magazine of the Society of G.K. Chesterton Vol. 28 #3 (Jan./Feb. 2025)
“The inclination here was to regard the war as a form of art, as a superior representation of life: only when mankind recognized that salvation lay in aesthetic values, in the symbolism of life and death, and not in sterile social norms, would the horror and sadness have meaning and be overcome. As evocation, as an instrument of change, the war had a positive purpose – that was the judgment of many artists, at least early on. The most radical artistic response to the war came from a group of people who made a complete break with traditional loyalties and gathered in neutral Zürich in 1915 to found there the Dada idea – if one can speak of this nihilistic manifestation as an idea. The cohort had an international flavor but its core was German.”
Modris Eksteins Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Era