Tremendous Trifles

You can read here and here about my tortuous forty-year journey to find the Chesterton articles I so wanted to reread. Today, I’ll just quickly get into it and say that over the last week, I reread one of the books I originally read during my happy time at Baylor University, and that in that book I came across the passage that made me fall in love with Chesterton forever.

Tremendous Trifles is a wonderful title! The alliterative moniker might rightly be seen to refer to the newspaper columns reprinted within. But GKC explains in an introduction that the title actually refers to the commonplace things all around us, heavy with significance, but ignored in our jaded familiarity. A piece of chalk when used to draw a simple figure on a piece of brown paper becomes an angelic herald proclaiming goodness and purity in the world, and the very ground in southern England, overlooked and downtrodden, becomes a piece of chalk! The forgotten remains of train tickets in Chesterton’s pockets become philosophical treatises. A toy theatre provides – literally – a small window on the world, and every child who has looked through a telescope made of a loose fist knows how a small window makes the world look magical. A toy seller becomes Father Christmas.

But Chesterton makes some important observations about . . . well . . . um . . . about observation itself. For instance, he says we must never give up the amateur jury, because justice should rightly depend on convincing people for whom courts and procedures and crimes are novelties, not jaded professionals who see these things everyday and don’t understand them as unusual. Later he claims that the destination of every trip is home and that the only way to appreciate home is to go away from it and come back; otherwise you can't see what is ordinary in your home but foreign in other places.

In a piece about watching prisoners coming off a train, Chesterton offers a sane definition of a sane person: one who can have tragedy in the heart and comedy in the head. But an even saner remark comes a little later in a complaint about sentimentalists who say torture is a relic of barbarism. Weak, wrong-headed attack! The plough, the fishing net, the horn, and civilization itself are relics of barbarism. The problem with torture, he says, is not that it is a relic of barbarism. “In actuality it is simply a relic of sin.” I’d almost forgotten the moment and the effect, but reading that sentence again after forty years, ending with that powerful three-letter word, brought it back in all its details. I even remember the exact place I was standing in our Waco student apartment when I fell in love.