This is a bit lengthy, but worth the read. Especially for those who are too busy to read something this long. Enjoy!

- Trey


On Running After One's Hat
By G. K. Chesterton



I feel an almost savage envy on hearing that London has been flooded
in my absence, while I am in the mere country. My own Battersea has
been, I understand, particularly favoured as a meeting of the waters.
Battersea was already, as I need hardly say, the most beautiful of
human localities. Now that it has the additional splendour of great
sheets of water, there must be something quite incomparable in the
landscape (or waterscape) of my own romantic town. Battersea must be
a vision of Venice. The boat that brought the meat from the butcher's
must have shot along those lanes of rippling silver with the strange
smoothness of the gondola. The greengrocer who brought cabbages to
the corner of the Latchmere Road must have leant upon the oar with
the unearthly grace of the gondolier. There is nothing so perfectly
poetical as an island; and when a district is flooded it becomes an
archipelago.

Some consider such romantic views of flood or fire slightly lacking
in reality. But really this romantic view of such inconvenience is
quite as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such
things an opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more
sensible than the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an
opportunity for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt
at Smithfield or having a toothache, is a positive thing; it can be
supported, but scarcely enjoyed. But, after all, our toothaches are
the exception, and as for being burnt at Smithfield, it only happens
to us at the very longest intervals. And most of the inconveniences
that make men swear or women cry are really sentimental of
imaginative inconveniences -- things altogether of the mind.

For instance, we often hear grown-up people complaining of having to
hang about a railway station and wait for a train. Did you ever hear
a small boy complain of having to hang about a railway station and
wait for a train? No; for to him to be inside a railway station is to
be inside a cavern of wonder and a palace of poetical pleasures.
Because to him the red light and the green light on the signal are
like a new sun and a new moon. Because to him when the wooden arm of
the signal falls down suddenly, it is as if a great king had thrown
down his staff as a signal and started a shrieking tournament of
trains.

I myself am of little boys' habit in this matter. They also serve who
only stand and wait for the two fifteen. Their meditations may be
full of rich and fruitful things. Many of the most purple hours of my
life have been passed at Clapham Junction, which is now, I suppose,
under water. I have been there in many moods so fixed and mystical
that the water might well have come up to my waist before I noticed
it particularly. But in the case of all such annoyances, as I have
said, everything depends upon the emotional point of view. You can
safely apply the test to almost every one of the things that are
currently talked of as the typical nuisance of daily life.

For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to
have to run after one's hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-
ordered and pious mind? Not merely because it is running, and running
exhausts one. The same people run much faster in games and sports.
The same people run much more eagerly after an uninteresting little
leather ball than they will after a nice silk hat. There is an idea
that it is humiliating to run after one's hat; and when people say it
is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but
man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are
comic -- eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are
exactly the things that are most worth doing -- such as making love.
A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running
after a wife.

Now a man could, if he felt rightly in the matter, run after his hat
with the manliest ardour and the most sacred joy. He might regard
himself as a jolly huntsman pursuing a wild animal, for certainly no
animal could be wilder. In fact, I am inclined to believe that hat-
hunting on windy days will be the sport of the upper classes in the
future. There will be a meet of ladies and gentlemen on some high
ground on a dusty morning. They will be told that the professional
attendants have started a hat in such-and-such a thicket, or whatever
be the technical term. Notice that this employment will in the
fullest degree combine sport with humanitarianism.

The hunters would feel that they were not inflicting pain. Nay, they
would feel that they were inflicting pleasure, rich, almost riotous
pleasure, upon the people who were looking on. When last I saw an old
gentleman running after his hat in Hyde Park, I told him that a heart
so benevolent as his ought to be filled with peace and thanks at the
thought of how much unaffected pleasure his every gesture and bodily
attitude were at that moment giving to the crowd.

The same principle can be applied to every other typical domestic
worry. A gentleman trying to get a fly out of the milk or a piece of
cork out of his glass of wine often imagines himself to be irritated.
Let him think for a moment of the patience of anglers sitting by dark
pools, and let his soul be immediately irradiated with gratification
and repose. Again, I have known some people of very modern views
driven by their distress to the use of theological terms to which
they attached no doctrinal significance, merely because a drawer was
jammed tight and they could not pull it out.

A friend of mine was particularly affected this way. Every day his
drawer was jammed, and every day in consequence it was something else
that rhymes with it. But I pointed out to him that this sense of
wrong was really subjective and relative; it rested entirely upon the
assumption that the drawer could, should, and would come out
easily. "But if," I said, "you picture to yourself that you are
pulling against some powerful and oppressive enemy, the struggle will
become merely exciting and not exasperating. Imagine that you are
tugging up a lifeboat out of the sea. Imagine that you are roping up
a fellow-creature out of an Alpine crevass. Imagine even that you are
a boy again and engaged in a tug-of-war between French and English."

Shortly after saying this I left him; but I have no doubt at all that
my words bore the best possible fruit. I have no doubt that every day
of his life he hangs on to the handle of that drawer with a flushed
face and eyes bright with battle, uttering encouraging shouts to
himself, and seeming to hear all round him the roar of an applauding
ring.

So I do not think that it is altogether fanciful or incredible to
suppose that even the floods in London may be accepted and enjoyed
poetically. Nothing beyond inconvenience seems really to have been
caused by them; and inconvenience, as I have said, is only one
aspect, and that the most unimaginative and accidental aspect of a
really romantic situation. An adventure is only an inconvenience
rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly
considered. The water that girdled the houses and shops of London
must, if anything, have only increased their previous witchery and
wonder. For as the Roman Catholic priest in the story said: "Wine is
good with everything except water," and on a similar principle, water
is good with everything except wine.