A Defence of Nonsense Author:Gilbert Keith Chesterton Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A DEFENCE OF RASH VOWS IF a prosperous modern man, with a high hat and a frock-coat, were to solemnly pledge himself before all his clerks and friends to coun... more »t the leaves on every third tree in Holland Walk, to hop up to the City on one leg every Thursday, to repeat the whole of Mill's "Liberty" seventy-six times, to collect 300 dandelions in fields belonging to any one of the name of Brown, to remain for thirty-one hours holding his left ear in his right hand, to sing the names of all his aunts in order of age on the top of an omnibus, or make any such unusual undertaking, we should immediately conclude that the man was mad, or, as it is sometimes expressed, was "an artist in life." Yet these vows are not more extraordinary than the vows which in the MiddleAges and in similar periods were made, not by fanatics merely, but by the greatesi figures in civic and national civilization— by kings, judges, poets, and priests. One man swore to chain two mountains to gether, and the great chain hung there, i was said, for ages as a monument of tha mystical folly. Another swore that h would find his way to Jerusalem with 8 patch over his eyes, and died looking fo it. It is not easy to see that these two ex ploits, judged from a strictly rational stand point, are any saner than the acts abov' suggested. A mountain is commonly stationary and reliable object which it i not necessary to chain up at night like dog. And it is not easy at first sight to se that a man pays a very high compliment t the Holy City by setting out for it unde conditions which render it to the la'st de gree improbable that he will ever get there But about this there is one striking thin to be noticed. If men in our time, we should, as w regard them as symbols of cadence." But the men who things were not decadent; t...« less