This was pretty kino, what do you think of it?

I'm still utterly baffled by it, but from what I gather, the central premise is about nihilism and resentment of God/the universe for suffering and through that, a sort of milton-esque satanic temptation towards leftism, and the idea that this state of things can only be brought into balance and resentment can only be cooled by the suffering of Christ and the Idea that God shares our suffering with us as opposed to being some cold and distant entity which sits above it all, and of course the idea of the true face of the nature of our existence which we cannot see as mentioned in the quote:

>Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud. Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front

As gregory, the "true anarchist", and our milton-esqur satan stand-in says :

>I do not curse you for being cruel. I do not curse you (though I might) for being kind. I curse you for being safe!

I'm still trying to wrap my head around the significance of all of the council being policemen though. Is it a comment on our duality, perhaps? That there exists some intrinsic draw towards God within us, even the nihilists? I have no idea. Theres still a lot here I really dont understand

Also, Sunday reminded me a lot of what I've heard of the judge from blood meridian, in that thyere are these physically huge, unnatural, absolutely intimidating, larger than life, living existential symbols. I couldn't help but wonder if there was any direct inspiration there

>>24568137 (OP)
Does Modern Library Americanise the grammar and spelling?

>>24568137 (OP)
It's one of my favorite novels. Read Conrad's The Secret Agent if you want something similar.

>>24568137 (OP)
>Idea that God shares our suffering with us as opposed to being some cold and distant entity which sits above it all

My god, christfaggots just can't stop coping. I'm seriously impressed by how far your copes go

>>24568263
This post seems like cope

the thin red line my malick is on a similar theme
it's more properly understood as a more existentialist work then getting any particular theological or political meaning out of it or something

underlying everything is God's creative activity but all our interactions with things are limited and by nature of being limited we misunderstand everything and miss how everything is kind of caught up in that dance which is the expression of being. Even in the end when he hears the can ye drink of it's like overwhelming his intellect and ability to see anything, sort of a vision of even within absolute being itself in God here's a line from the everlasting man:

>The mob went along with the Sadducees and the Pharisees, the philosophers and the moralists. It went along with the imperial magistrates and the sacred priests, the scribes and the soldiers, that the one universal human spirit might suffer a universal condemnation; that there might be one deep, unanimous chorus of approval and harmony when Man was rejected of men.
>There were solitudes beyond where none shall follow. There were secrets in the inmost and invisible part of that drama that have no symbol in speech; or in any severance of a man from men. Nor is it easy for any words less stark and single-minded than those of the naked narrative even to hint at the horror of exaltation that lifted itself above the hill. Endless expositions have not come to the end of it, or even to the beginning. And if there be any sound that can produce a silence, we may surely be silent about the end and the extremity; when a cry was driven out of that darkness in words dreadfully distinct and dreadfully unintelligible, which man shall never understand in all the eternity they have purchased for him; and for one annihilating instant an abyss that is not for our thoughts had opened even in the unity of the absolute; and God had been forsaken of God.

I think kind of similarly captures that mood at the end. It kind of touches on a common existentialist point of the fullness of being is sort of not something we can access. That the visions of goodness and badness we see are sort of projections of our false understandings onto things and our wrestling is kind of coming to grips with it.

i think Gabriel Marcels' the mystery of being is the closest I can think of to that sort of Christian existentialist perspective. (Chesterton had much more in common with modern thinkers like nietzsche then he is typically given credit for)

>>24568137 (OP)
It's a fun read but don't take it too seriously. Remember that it's "A Nightmare" so you can't expect too much coherence in the ideas it's portraying. Chesterton explicitly said this in response to critics who were trying to understand what kind of theological statement Chesterson was trying to make.

>>24568137 (OP)
I read it recently and liked it. Wish there was more of the "philosophical detective" story.

>>24568137 (OP)
After the fourth? Council men was revealed to be a police officer it was pretty predictable that the secretary was also one especially when they recruited the townspeople, ruined the twist and tension of the battle scene because I was waiting for the characters to figure it out.
I felt that the ending wasn't really in line with the rest of it, to be honest, felt very disjointed though I did enjoy it.
Went from a very implausible but still grounded detective book, to entering what seemed to be fae courts and dealing with dreamscapes in the last pages of the book, and then suddenly Gregory is back as a literally who, and the books ends up waking up from a dream.
I was excited to learn about Sunday and why he had pulled together such a nonsensical scheme but I never really go the closure I was looking for.

>>24568486
I'm a little surprised it took you that long to figure it out. The man in the dark room is described with singular emphasis on his being a huge man, and mere chapters later, Sunday is introduced described the exact same way, so I figured out that Sunday was the man in the dark room the second he was introduced. I'm honestly surprised to here you describe it as a "twist" since it was so overtly obvious from the introduction of the charachter that I got no impression that it was meant to be hidden from the reader

That being said the ending does feel disconnected. The ending makes sense to me in a vacuum, but I still have no idea what the point of pretty much the entire narrative up until that point was.

>>24568486
Kinda where I'm at with it. I actually liked the ending for what it was but it feels disconnected and I'm struggling to come up with any kind of reason for...literally anything that happened up until that point, like why Sunday did all this and what the point of them all being police was. Very strange. Basically the entire narrative feels like it is tacked on the ending and I'm not sure how these two pieces relate to each other

>>24568259
Interesting, I've also been reading a lot of Conrad's shorter stuff and noticed some parallels, in fact right before I read this I read the informer and the anarchist and it really set the mood. I've been mulling over the idea of checking out some of his full novels

Id hate to meet the guy who was monday!! zing!

>>24568272
>>24568263

COPE, COPE, BASED, ONIONS, TROON, kill yourselves, the both of you.

>>24569226
Absolutely seething

>>24568513
>>24568486
i already explained it it's about our relation with beings it's metaphysical/existential
the ending is directly about everything that happened.
It appears everything is at war and hostile to each other and you are alone in the universe.

The whole scene when the masses are turning against them
>“No; oddly enough I am not quite hopeless. There is one insane little hope that I cannot get out of my mind. The power of this whole planet is against us, yet I cannot help wondering whether this one silly little hope is hopeless yet.”
>“In what or whom is your hope?” asked Syme with curiosity.
>“In a man I never saw,” said the other, looking at the leaden sea.
>“I know what you mean,” said Syme in a low voice, “the man in the dark room. But Sunday must have killed him by now.”
>“Perhaps,” said the other steadily; “but if so, he was the only man whom Sunday found it hard to kill.”

it's essentially a series of apparent evils and they are in the worst situation possible
>“Everything’s gone. I’m gone! I can’t trust my own bodily machinery. I feel as if my own hand might fly up and strike me.”
and at the end
> If you were the man in the dark room, why were you also Sunday, an offense to the sunlight? If you were from the first our father and our friend, why were you also our greatest enemy? We wept, we fled in terror; the iron entered into our souls—and you are the peace of God! Oh, I can forgive God His anger, though it destroyed nations; but I cannot forgive Him His peace.

The sort of apparent enmity we see in everything actually just being our partial view into the great "dance" of everything. Everything at it's core is good and expressed as this creative activity of God, even this evil we encounter is just part of the dance we can't see
> Why does each thing on the earth war against each other thing? Why does each small thing in the world have to fight against the world itself? Why does a fly have to fight the whole universe?
>So that each man fighting for order may be as brave and good a man as the dynamiter.
and that that conflict even occurs at the root of being itself as I quoted here
>>24568296

The end with everything being an adorable triviality is seeing you are in that dance. You can't/won't understand everything but you have the "good news".

it's about how we relate to beings in their appearing as well as seeing through that to their core. ppl do not give chesterton his due.

>>24569226
>>24569219
Kek

>>24569361
Excellent, thank you

>>24569361
I'm curious what you think about The Napoleon of Notting Hill. I think Chesterton doesn't nearly get enough credit for this excellent novel.

>>24571599
love this one been a while since I read it need to read it again.
The ending to me is just very much.. as I said I don't think people would be comfortable, the sort of people who really like Chesterton, if they really understood what the novel is really getting at.
It very much and rather obviously a guess an explanation of that sort of existential patriotism he talks about in orthodoxy.
>My acceptance of the universe is not optimism,
it is more like patriotism. It is a matter of primary loyalty.
>For decoration is not given to hide horrible things: but to decorate things already adorable. A mother does not give her child a blue bow because he is so ugly without it. A lover does not give a girl a necklace to hide her neck. If men loved Pimlico as mothers love children, arbitrarily, because it is THEIRS, Pimlico in a year or two might be fairer than Florence. Some readers will say that this is a mere fantasy. I answer that this is the actual history of
mankind. This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Go back to the darkest roots of civilization and you will find them knotted round some sacred stone or encircling some sacred well. People first paid honour to a spot and afterwards gained glory for it. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.

and tying it to napoleon the end conversation between adam and quin is one of my favorite sections from anything Chesterton has written, i tried to quote it but I just love that entire final chapter
>"Suppose I am God," said the voice, "and suppose I made the world in idleness. Suppose the stars, that you think eternal, are only the idiot fireworks of an everlasting schoolboy. Suppose the sun and the moon, to which you sing alternately, are only the two eyes of one vast and sneering giant, opened alternately in a never-ending wink. Suppose the trees, in my eyes, are as foolish as enormous toad-stools. Suppose Socrates and Charlemagne are to me only beasts, made funnier by walking on their hind legs. Suppose I am God, and having made things, laugh at them."
>"And suppose I am man," answered the other. "And suppose that I give the answer that shatters even a laugh. Suppose I do not laugh back at you, do not blaspheme you, do not curse you. But suppose, standing up straight under the sky, with every power of my being, I thank you for the fools' paradise you have made.

I think the connection between these two is kind of clear. Our attachment to things is at some level fairly arbitrary but we are attached
>We are mad, because we are not two men, but one man.

There's something of having this playfulness to form attachments the having the fanaticism of that fundamental attachment. That paradoxical theme of Chesterton is kind of shown in the two separate characters the looseness of taking up the playful joker and of the fanatic at once.

>>24571853
cont.

Part of that I think is related to thursday in that, and this is also just a sort of common idea in existential thinkers of the time as to why I keep bringing them up he is just like perfectly in line with them to me, if you need to have that "playfulness" to be willing to see that there are different aspects to being and to you. You have to be willing to embrace the idea of that patriotic attachment to neighborhood and then in entertaining it be a fanatic and play it out and be responsible and grateful to whatever is revealed in it to those fanatical extremes. It even has that kind of greek or nietzschean glory of the soldier and violence of war that comes from that. The ball and the cross kind of has that as well, the two seek to fight to the death but no one in london will let them because it's so "unreasonable".

The sort of virtue it indicates is that rather loose modern sort of loose fanatical attachment because that's how you actually understand that position. Another good example of that would be harold moates from wise blood a hero whose an athiest. The sort of anti-lukewarmness in general (it being better to be a serious athiest than a lukewarm Christian)
>I cannot believe anything but that God loved it as He must surely love anything that is itself and unreplaceable. But even for that I do not care. If God, with all His thunders, hated it, I loved it.
I do think that does end up in God (seeing fully the being of a thing points to God while having restricted/nuanced understandings of it actually takes you away from God, being afraid of being playful or a fanatic keeps you cut off from that being)

it's the sort of rooting "the good" in being again and in that particularity. The particularity of someone loving a city because it's "theirs" and that being what makes it beautiful. As time has gone on it's actually grown on me more and more how fundamental that actually is for any kind of knowledge or understanding.


As I said though I need to read the whole thing again it's been a while.

It's been over twenty years since I read it. I remember finding the whole thing fun and weird and cool. But whatever allegory or statement about God he was making was just completely lost on me.

I feel that way about pretty much all the Chesterton I've read, now that I think about it.

>>24568137 (OP)
>Anarchists aren't real
>If you chase Anarchists you become one yourself
What subversive messaging is going on here?

I though these books were just sherlock holmes but priest?

>>24574527
that's the father brown series that's unrelated, lots of authors just did more normal mystery novels to make money then wrote all the stuff they actually wanted to. father brown is fun but it's not comparable really to his serious fiction.

>>24568137 (OP)
You seriously need to place the book into its era of anachists running around every country killing kinds, heads of state and subverting any intellectual movement with their destructive tendency.