Essay: "On Running After One's Hat." GK Chesterton.

One-minute review: Battersea, his home in London, has been flooded. But what seems to be a disaster to some is a romantic adventure to others. True also for running after one’s hat. Don’t be irritated by little bothers and discomforts, inconveniences. Turn them into adventures.

Quotes:

“There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat, and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic, but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love. A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.”

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

Great Essays. Ed. Houston Peterson. New York: Washington Square Press, Inc. 1960.

What is an essay? “They are all prefaces. A preface is nothing but a talk with the reader; and they [essays] do nothing else.” Charles Lamb.