Excerpt:
“Scraps accumulate and can add up to an education.”
So writes a reader commenting on a recent post. He goes on to cite Kierkegaard, whose thinking baffles me, but adds: “Chesterton, the extraordinary writer of the ordinary, titled an essay collection Tremendous Trifles.” Now he has my attention. The volume is a gathering of columns Chesterton wrote for the Daily News between 1902 and 1909. Just days before I had reread one of its essays, “What I Found in My Pocket,” in which Chesterton describes being confined “in a third-class carriage for a rather long journey.” Our twenty-first-century equivalent is a lengthy, crowded but solitary cross-country flight in an airliner. Chesterton writes:
“Now I deny most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting. So I stared at the joints of the walls and seats, and began thinking hard on the fascinating subject of wood.”
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