Father Brown and "Only Connect:" This One's For Dolce Carina

Ok, so I'm reading Chesterton's Father Brown stories. And I'm all super excited about it for any number of reasons. But what I'm noticing most right now is that everything I'm reading (Chesterton and everything else!) is reminding me of all kinds of other stuff I've already read. It's like it's all connected, and knowledge, books, reading, thinking, all of it seems to become this matrix in which to live and work and think and love, you know? And this is good, right, because we know that insanity is compartmentalizing our lives, trying to separate the professional from the personal, the work from the reward. And Father Brown, who so reminds me of C.S. Lewis, is both the work and the reward right now. And this makes me happy.

And C.S. Lewis read and liked and appreciated Chesterton's work. But Father Brown himself says things that Lewis's characters, maybe even Lewis himself, would have said: "Reason and justice grip the remotest and loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don't they look as the they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don't fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. One plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pears, you would still find a notice-board, 'Thou shalt not steal.'" This could totally be Lewis's Ransom; in fact, this very idea is maybe what Lewis's entire Space Trilogy is really about.

But Lewis, Tolkien, now Chesterton, even Inspector Morse (had a date with Morse last night), all these these writers, these characters, they seem to be doing the same kind of thing somehow, not just with morals and Christianity, but with cultural identity, what it means to be English, what it means to have a medieval cultural heritage. So here I am, right back at medievalism, right back at my dissertation. And it all makes sense. And suddenly the dissertation itself feels like more than just a hoop to jump through, more than just an exercise. It's become a foundation, a foundation to do and think other kinds of things. It's led to, or maybe it's created, this nexus, this matrix. And now I can say for sure that I'm a better person for having finished it.

So I hope that at least some of this made sense. It's what I needed to write just now. The important thing, at least for the moment, is that I'm reading Chesterton, and Chesterton means something to me. And Chesterton will connect back to Lewis, to Tolkien, and someday will connect to Dalgleish, to Morse.