It's that time of year again. Once a year I get the urge to read GK Chesterton's haunting epic The Man Who Was Thursday (the annotated version linked is highly recommended). Thursday is enigmatic, humorous, frustrating and fascinating. It is a lot like life. Early in the book we have a dialog between an anarchist poet (Gregory) and "a poet of law, a poet of order" (Syme).
"An artist is identical with an anarchist," [Gregory] cried. "You might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway."
"So it is," said Mr. Syme.
"Nonsense!" said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. "Why do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!"
"It is you who are unpoetical," replied the poet Syme. "If what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!"
"Must you go?" inquired Gregory sarcastically.
"I tell you," went on Syme with passion, "that every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hairbreadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word 'Victoria,' it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed 'Victoria'; it is the victory of Adam."
Gregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.
"And even then," he said, "we poets always ask the question, 'And what is Victoria now that you have got there?' You think Victoria is like the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt."
"There again," said Syme irritably, "what is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I'm hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is—revolting. It's mere vomiting."I'm an engineer and I work in a technology company. My company touts innovation and creativity. Indeed, I have recently entered a contest for best innovation. We have had talks about the power of innovation and we all nod our heads sagely and admit that creativity is the key to success.
Yet, there is a value in plain-old, humdrum order. Imagine if every electrical outlet in your house was a different style, and the new widget you just brought home from the store had yet some other arrangement of prongs. Imagine, indeed, if the stores didn't agree on what kind of money they'd take. A store might take cash, credit, Apple Pay, Android Pay or Paypal, but all those transactions will be done in US currency (if the store is in the US). Imagine if the plumbing fixtures didn't come in standard sizes, or if some cars had brake pedals on the right and some had the brakes on the left.
Innovation is wonderful. We all benefit from new ideas and better products and more convenience, though a lot of the convenience brought about by technology comes from alleviating inconvenience from an earlier generation of technology. But innovation is built upon a framework of agreed-upon standards. Apple disrupted the cell-phone industry with the iPhone, but you can still call and text Samsung phones from an iPhone. Without the standards you just have chaos.
Indeed, one of the marks of successful innovation is that it becomes the standard. Check out the history of railroad gauges, for instance. Chrysler was an early adopter of airbags and now you can't get a car without them.
This is a different kind of post for me. It's irrelevant to most of what I put here. Actually, the quote above from Thursday is mostly irrelevant to the rest of the book. I could make a God connection somewhere -- that God uses the ordinary world and the people in it as His "framework" to innovate on -- but I don't know if I can make that point without sounding stupid.
But mainly I just wanted to plug Chesterton, and that's always a good thing to do.
