marchenkraft

[marchenkraft]

by Nikiphoros Vrettakos, translated from the Greek by Kimon Friar

[marchenkraft]

[marchenkraft]

After You Speak (Edward Thomas, 1916)

After you speak And what you meant Is plain, My eyes Meet yours that mean⁠— With your cheeks and hair⁠— Something more wise, More dark, And far different. Even so the lark Loves dust And nestles in it The minute Before he must Soar in lone flight So far, Like a black star He seems⁠— A mote Of singing dust Afloat Above, That dreams And sheds no light. I know your lust Is love.

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I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with joys, with flowers, and fireworks in the old European style. I can understand that a deity might be worshipped with sorrows. But I cannot imagine any deity being worshipped with inconveniences.

-- G.K. Chesterton, A Cab Ride Across Country (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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The most difficult kind of talking is to talk about common necessities. The reason is obvious. The names of common necessities vary completely with each nation and are generally somewhat odd and quaint. How, for instance, could a Frenchman suppose that a coalbox would be called a "scuttle"? If he has ever seen the word scuttle it has been in the Jingo Press, where the "policy of scuttle" is used whenever we give up something to a small Power like Liberals, instead of giving up everything to a great Power, like Imperialists.

-- G.K. Chesterton, A Tragedy of Twopence (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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There is only one reason why all grown-up people do not play with toys; and it is a fair reason. The reason is that playing with toys takes so very much more time and trouble than anything else. Playing as children mean playing is the most serious thing in the world; and as soon as we have small duties or small sorrows we have to abandon to some extent so enormous and ambitious a plan of life. We have enough strength for politics and commerce and art and philosophy; we have not enough strength for play.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Toy Theatre (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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We talk of wild animals, but the wildest animal is man. [...] All the beasts of the field are respectable; it is only man who has broken loose. All animals are domestic animals; only man is ever undomestic. All animals are tame animals; it is only we who are wild.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Tower (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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[...] any collection of printed words is quite enough to suggest infinite complexities of mental ingenuity. When I find myself opposite the words "Sunlight Soap" I can exhaust all the aspects of Sun Worship, Apollo, and Summer poetry before I go on to the less congenial subject of soap.

-- G.K. Chesterton, What I Found in My Pocket (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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There are some refusals which, though they may be done what is called conscientiously, yet carry so much of their whole horror in the very act of them, that a man must in doing them not only harden but slightly corrupt his heart. One of them was the refusal of milk to young mothers when their husbands were in the field against us. Another is the refusal of fairy tales to children.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Dragon's Grandmother (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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The giant had the one frightful quality of a miracle; the more he became incredible the more he became solid. The less one could believe in him the more plainly one could see him.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Giant (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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[...] we can deal strongly with gloomy mystery, but not with happy mystery; we are not rationalists, but diabolists.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Red Angel (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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When you have discovered why enormous English estates were not long ago cut up into small holdings like the land of France, you will have discovered why the Englishman is more drunken than the Frenchman. The Englishman, among his million delightful virtues, really has this quality, which may strictly be called "hand to mouth," because under its influence a man's hand automatically seeks his own mouth, instead of seeking (as it sometimes should do) his oppressor's nose.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Wind and the Trees (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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And this is really all that we can do when we fight something really stronger than ourselves; we can deal it its death-wound one moment; it deals us death in the end. It is something if we can shock and jar the unthinking impetus and enormous innocence of evil; [...] It is enough for the great martyrs and criminals of the French revolution, that they have surprised for all time the secret weakness of the strong. They have awakened and set leaping and quivering in his crypt for ever the coward in the hearts of kings.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Giant (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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The wind is up above the world before a twig on the tree has moved. So there must always be a battle in the sky before there is a battle on the earth. Since it is lawful to pray for the coming of the kingdom, it is lawful also to pray for the coming of the revolution that shall restore the kingdom. It is lawful to hope to hear the wind of Heaven in the trees. It is lawful to pray "Thine anger come on earth as it is in Heaven."

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Wind and the Trees (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Red Angel (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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At the four corners of a child's bed stand Perseus and Roland, Sigurd and St. George. If you withdraw the guard of heroes you are not making him rational; you are only leaving him to fight the devils alone. For the devils, alas, we have always believed in.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Red Angel (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

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All this kind of talk is based on that complete forgetting of what a child is like which has been the firm foundation of so many educational schemes. If you keep bogies and goblins away from children they would make them up for themselves. One small child in the dark can invent more hells than Swedenborg. One small child can imagine monsters too big and black to get into any picture, and give them names too unearthly and cacophonous to have occurred in the cries of any lunatic. The child, to begin with, commonly likes horrors, and he continues to indulge in them even when he does not like them.

-- G.K. Chesterton, The Red Angel (from the collection Tremendous Trifles, 1909)