Currently Reading Heretics/orthodoxy: Nelson's Royal Classics By G. K. Chesterton see related

topic: good readin'

"The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones.  Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so.  Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.  Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul.  Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labor by which all things live... Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.  The vault above us is not deaf because the universe is an idiot; the silence is not the heartless silence of an endless and aimless world.  Rather the silence around us is a small and pitiful stillness like the prompt stillness in a sick-room.  We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy; because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce.  We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels.  So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.

"Joy, which was the small publicity of the pagan, is the gigantic secret of the Christian."-- pp. 309-310

I finished Orthodoxy!  Excellent stuff; now I know why everyone I know who has read this has loved it.  If you haven't, you should.

Now, what to read next... I'm feeling the need for something perhaps more practical and girly... either Leithart's Miniatures in Morals or Nancy Wilson's The Fruit of Her Hands or maybe I could borrow Doug Wilson's My Life for Yours... suggestions, anyone?