Some fun things to read and watch
An article, a quote, and a moving video of a lady singing “He’s got the whole world in His hands” that made me cry, I’m not even kidding.
Happy Monday, my darlings.
Today I have a smattering of interesting things that I’m just going to expel in your general direction, hoping some of it is worth your time and attention.
This is an article from a journalist I follow on Substack. He’s doing a series of posts related to the worldwide phenomenon of people who live in wealthy, first world countries choosing not to have kids (or choosing to have less kids), despite the resources and relative comforts available to them.
I’m sending you this, not because the journalist wrote it, but because a mother of five (who homeschools her kids) wrote an interesting email to him about her opinion of why people are choosing to not have kids, and he reprinted it in this post. I think she brings out some fascinating points in what she wrote:
This is a quote that my husband randomly sent me last week from one of my favorite late 19th century authors, G.K. Chesterton.
Chesterton, though a passionate Catholic, was one of the subtle influences God used to bring C.S. Lewis to Christianity, which is pretty cool.
I don’t have a deep reason for sending you this quote except for the fact that it’s interesting LOL. Consider this your liberal arts moment of the day, meant to make you more well rounded and well read.
Also, because this was written in the early 1900s, I need to clarify his use of the word “romance.” When Chesterton wrote these words, the term “romance” (as it related to writing) meant this:
The type of romance considered here is mainly the genre of novel defined by the novelist Walter Scott as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents", in contrast to mainstream novels which realistically depict the state of a society.
So when he uses the word “romance,” don’t picture one of those novels with a buff, shirtless man in a kilt embracing some busty, half-clothed damsel with the title “Mad, Bad and Dangerous in Plaid” printed above them in gold letters.1
Anyway, here’s the quote:
The feeling partly arises from an idea which is at the root of all the arts — the idea of separation. Romance seeks to divide certain people from the lump of humanity, as the statue is divided from the lump of marble. We read a good novel not in order to know more people, but in order to know fewer. Instead of the humming swarm of human beings, relatives, customers, servants, postmen, afternoon callers, tradesmen, strangers who tell us the time, strangers who remark on the weather, beggars, waiters, and telegraph-boys — instead of this bewildering human swarm which passes us every day, fiction asks us to follow one figure (say the postman) consistently through his ecstasies and agonies. That is what makes one impatient with that type of pessimistic rebel who is always complaining of the narrowness of his life and demanding a larger sphere. Life is too large for us as it is: we have all too many things to attend to. All true romance is an attempt to simplify it, to cut it down to plainer and more pictorial proportions. What dullness there is in our life arises mostly from its rapidity; people pass us too quickly to show us their interesting side. By the end of the week we have talked to a hundred bores; whereas, if we had stuck to one of them, we might have found ourselves talking to a new friend, or a humorist, or a murderer, or a man who had seen a ghost.
I do not believe that there are any ordinary people. That is, I do not believe that there are any people whose lives are really humdrum or whose characters are really colourless. But the trouble is that one can so quickly see them all in a lump, like a land surveyor, and it would take so long to see them one by one as they really are, like a great novelist. Looking out of the window, I see a very steep little street, with a row of prim little houses breaking their necks downhill in the most decorous single file. If I were landlord of that street, or a visiting philanthropist making myself objectionable down that street, I could easily take it all in at a glance, sum it all up and say, ‘Houses at £40 a year.’ But suppose I could be father confessor to that Street, how awful and altered it would look! Each house would be sundered from its neighbour as by an earthquake and would stand alone in a wilderness of the soul. I should know that in this house a man was going mad with drink, that in that a man had kept single for a woman, that in the next a woman was on the edge of abysses, that in the next a woman was living an unknown life which might in more devout ages have been gilded in hagiographies and made the fountain of miracles. People talk much of the quarrel between science and religion; but the deepest difference is that the individual is so much bigger than the average, that the inside of life is much larger than the outside.
Next, an Instagram video.
You guys, I hate Instagram. But sometimes bright little lights shine through the miasma and I highly recommend this video if you’re stressing out about life or anything in general right now. You should be able to watch the video whether you have an Instagram account or not.
And what do we have over here? Only a sneak peek of the page design process of my book :D :D :D.
Can’t wait for this sucker to come out!!
That’s all I have for you, my babes.
As usual, thanks for reading my dorky, humble, snarky little newsletter. You guys are the best. 🥹
Believe it or not, this is a real romance novel title, or at least thus says this website I found. Here’s the tagline for the book: Two kilt makers in the Highlands are driven to a turf war over ownership of a design. The last thing they expected was for love to blossom over a patent rights dispute.