Tremendous Trifles

And who needs one?  You might very well ask.  Expect posts on the following: literature, art, tea, cake, beer, theology, liturgy, architecture, history, early music, wine, women and song.  And if that won’t keep her afloat then let her sink, begad. 

Apologies to the author of the inestimable blog Dappled Things, who first had the idea of blogging under this title: I realised only afterwards that I’d re-invented the wheel, but the theme’s too good not to re-cycle!

The manifesto:

These fleeting sketches […] amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary–a diary recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy–the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep.  Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public, for bread and cheese.  But trivial as are the topics they are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive.  As the reader’s eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages, it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post, a window blind or a wall.  It is a thousand to one that the reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is, never realised.  He could not write an essay on such a post or wall:  he does not know what the post or wall mean.  He could not even write the synopsis of an essay; as “The Bed-Post; Its Significance–Security Essential to Idea of Sleep–Night Felt as Infinite–Need of Monumental Architecture,” and so on.  He could not sketch in outline his theoretic attitude towards window-blinds, even in the form of a summary.  “The Window-Blind–Its Analogy to the Curtain and Veil–Is Modesty Natural?–Worship of and Avoidance of the Sun, etc., etc.”  None of us think enough of these things on which the eye rests.  But don’t let us let the eye rest.  Why should the eye be so lazy? Let us exercise the eye until it learns to see startling facts that run across the landscape as plain as a painted fence.  Let us be ocular athletes.  Let us learn to write essays on a stray cat or a coloured cloud.  I have attempted some such thing in what follows; but anyone else may do it better, if anyone else will only try.

G. K. Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles, Preface

And now a picture (not of me):