“I have often had a fancy for writing a romance about an English yachtsman who slightly miscalculated his course and discovered England under the impression that it was a new island in the South Seas… There will probably be an impression that the man who landed (armed to the teeth and talking by signs) to plant the British flag on that barbaric temple which turned out to be the Pavilion at Brighton, felt rather a fool… What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it really was old South Wales. How can we contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? … how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town, and the comfort and honour of being our own town? … I wish to set forth my faith as particularly answering this double spiritual need, the need for that mixture of the familiar and the unfamiliar which Christianity has rightly named romance.”
Orthodoxy II: The Maniac
“Poets do not go mad; but chess-players do. Mathematicians go mad, and cashiers; but creative artists very seldom. I am not, as will be seen, in any sense attacking logic: I only say that this danger does lie in logic, not in imagination.”
“The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits.”
Orthodoxy III: The Suicide of Thought
“But the new rebel is a skeptic, and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore he can never be really a revolutionist…” but before we get to this classic, lets build up to it a little bit:
“The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues.”
“The peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought”
Orthodoxy IV: The Ethics of Elfland
The modern world as I found it was solid for Calvinism, for the necessity of things being as they are … All the towering materialism which dominates the modern mind rests ultimately on one assumption; false assumption. It is supposed that a if thing goes on repeating itself it is probably dead; a piece of clockwork. People feel that if the universe was personal it would vary; if the sun were alive, it would dance … Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising.
Orthodoxy V: The Flag of the World
I have always liked “capture the flag” and even more, the board version, Stratego. It is probably good to put like a #7/Sergeant inside your bombs surrounding your flag, once the #8/Miner breaks through, he will need a friend to gain the ultimate prize.
But, once again, CS Lewis comes to the rescue, here is a good quote ok a few, regarding flags and military operations:
Orthodoxy VI: The Paradoxes of Christianity
no material yet, but I have found this a paradox: why do some of these characters look even more like each other than one might otherwise suspect?
Orthodoxy VII: The Eternal Revolution
again, for this chapter “I’ve got nothin” so far. Eternal Revolution,
a little bit like Chairman Mao’s “continuous revolution” (an analog improvement on the USSR’s 5 year plans for world revolution and domination). Too bad Bill and Ted did not take him on their Excellent Adventure(s)
