Thread by @wrathofgnon

First page of G.K. Chesterton's "The New Jerusalem", 1920.

G.K. Chesterton on his way to Jerusalem vis Charing Cross Road muses on the paradoxes of politics and ideology. 1920.

On his first impression of Jerusalem, December 1919, and on walls and suburbs and citizenship.

“Happy is the city that has a wall; and happier still if it is a precipice.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“For a creed is like a ladder, while an evolution is only like a slope. A spiritual and social evolution is generally a pretty slippery slope; a miry slope where it is very easy to slide down again.” — The New Jerusalem
G.K. Chesterton, 1920

“...a man must decide which way he will leave the city; he cannot merely drift out of the city as he drifts out of the modern cities through a litter of slums.” — The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton

I hardly expected to find so many excellent points on urbanism when I started a closer reading of G.K. Chesterton's New Jerusalem (1920). Here he is, poetically of course, but obviously correctly, on the naming of roads, and on gates.

The massive hole in the Jerusalem walls next to the Jaffa gate which the craven Turks tore open for Kaiser Wilhelm's parade in 1898 and the current rulers have found too convenient to rectify. Wastrels and useless scum, all of them. Fix it!

“The Christians made the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Moslems made the Mosque of Omar; but this is what the most scientific culture made at the end of the great century of science. It made an enormous hole.”
— The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton

As Chesterton readies himself to enter Jerusalem on that December day in 1919 the most extraordinary thing happens: it begins to snow. Imagine what that would make to a man of his sensitivity and imagination!

The New Jerusalem. G.K. Chesterton muses on tourism, tourists, and the Sphinx.

“I never could understand why such critics who agree that the kingdom of heaven is for children, should forbid it to be the only sort of kingdom that children would really like; a kingdom with real crowns of gold or even of tinsel.” — The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton, 1920

“It is really not so repulsive to see the poor asking for money as to see the rich asking for more money. And advertisement is the rich asking for more money.” — The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton, 1920

This is a great book. On faithless faiths, and especiallt that of the modern Progressive: “After a thousand years of Turkish tyranny, the religion of a London fashionable preacher would not be degraded. It would be destroyed.” — The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton, 1920.

Chesterton on love and hate, history and tradition, Europe and The Holy Land.

“It is quite true that with this historic sense men inherit heavy responsibilities and revenges, fury and sorrow and shame. It is also true that without it men die, and nobody even digs their graves.”

“While the land we love is solid under our feet to the earth's centre, they have to see all they love and hate lying in strata like alternate night and day, as incompatible and as inseparable.”
— The New Jerusalem, G.K. Chesterton

In Jerusalem, Chesterton meets some interesting characters to say the least. And in the meeting, pinpoints something of the vast gulf between the occident and the orient. Here, the remarkable Rev Otis Allan Glazebrook, 1845, Richmond, Virginia, died 1931.

G.K. Chesterton on the mob, or the masses: the same in in the first century A.D. as in the 20th or 21st. The mob will never do anything half-heartedly.

Chesterton in 1920 by exposing himself to the Orient notes the Occidental inability to call things by their right names. A phenomena George Orwell would later make hay with. “Department of Defense” being one of my modern favorite terms.

“We are transferring the fictions and even the hypocrisies of our own insular institutions from a place where they can be tolerated to a place where they will be torn in pieces.” — G.K. Chesterton on our mania for forcing our concepts of States and Rights on the Middle East.