Quarks Of Joy

I sit here with a borrowed computer, my fingers complaining as if they were touching borrowed underwear. It all feels rather unseemly. But I press on, fingering the home row into submission, wondering if home is where the heart is and whether you'll cause a row in response to my lengthy absence.

During the inexplicable dyspepsia to which my computer annually succumbs -- so it seems -- this round has me suspicious that computer manufacturers intentionally build into their products problems that ensure that, by a specific date, any given computer shall need repair or replacement. Who's to know? Perhaps it is the way of the computer-driven world; perhaps my car's anti-anti switch needs fixing precisely because it was programmed to fail. Of course, I am not really prone to this sense of conspiracy so prevalent these days. But it is worth a wonder.

***

In the midst of a cease fire along the Israel-Lebanon border, let me break the silence of that front by pointing the reader away from all that. Let me point you instead to a book I am reading about C. S. Lewis called The Narnian. Now I have read several biographies of Mr. Lewis; this one is on an equal footing with the best of them, and I must say it is thus far my favorite. Alan Jacobs, its author, has such mastery over the important things that I can't even begin to defend my position that you should read it. It is beautifully written and thoroughly researched; it addresses precisely those things that interest me most, i.e. Lewis' conversion to Christianity and how that conversion influenced his literary work.

What sold me on the book came after a quick perusal of the book's index while I was standing in Borders just before Christmas last. The index showed a goodly number of G. K. Chesterton references which proved, at least to this Chesterton fan, not only to be new to me, but that the volume possessed considerable merit. (That the book ended up in my hands Christmas morning speaks of the considerable merit possessed by my dear and attentive wife.) Please permit me to pass along one passage from The Narnian about dear old GKC; the context is whether a young Lewis should enlist in the British military and take up a place in the trenches of the Western Front:

It is true that there was great social pressure on men to enlist: the writer G. K. Chesterton, though he was forty years old and weighed well over three hundred pounds, during the war was accosted on a London street by a woman who asked, "Why aren't you out at the front?" (Chesterton replied, "My dear madam, if you will step around this way a little, you will see that I am.")

It is this sort of quick wit that endears Mr. Chesterton to me. It is wit that is pure, jolly, and thoroughly without guile. There is nothing mean or petty; it is waggish, droll, playful. Then there's this passage:

One of Lewis' favorite writers in these days was G. K. Chesterton, that indefinable man. ... Chesterton was an enormous man ... and claimed to be suspicious of "hard, cold, thin people." He loved nothing better than arguing, and Chesterton's public debates with a wide range of opponents were one of the great spectator sports of early-twentieth-century England. One of his opponents, a dramatist and (later) screenwriter with the delightful name of Cosmo Hamilton, was, like most people who knew him, simply overwhelmed: "To hear Chesterton's howl of joy ... to see him double himself up in an agony of laughter at my personal insults, to watch the effect of his sportsmanship on a shocked audience who were won to mirth by his intense and pea-hen-like quarks of joy was a sight and a sound for the gods. ... It was monstrous, gigantic, amazing, deadly, delicious. Nothing like it has ever been done before or will ever be seen, heard and felt like it again."

Quarks of joy, monstrous and gigantic. Those of you who have read Chesterton's wonderful The Man Who Was Thursday will instantly recognize what sort of man he was: He was a man as big and fun and mirthful as the Sabbath.

Why tell you this here? I don't know. Perhaps it is that I long for better days; for doubling over in laughter in the face of insults; of enjoying the lively and lovely row, and of loving my enemies with a contagious and spiteless guffaw.

Peace to you,

BG.

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.

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