"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?"
Permit me to write another blog about an idea from Chesterton.
Yesterday I read through just the first few pages of my favorite book (because LotR doesn't count), The Man Who Was Thursday. In that first chapter the main character, Gabriel Syme, is a poet arguing against anarchy being poetic. He states that the "most poetical thing in the world is not being sick."
The idea behind is argument is that in every day life things go wrong. Things never go exactly according to plan. So the most poetic things are not the disastrous and unintended things, those are just normal. It's epical (in the original sense of the word) when things go exactly according to plan.
This is a cool idea in and of itself but I thought maybe it was an applicable sort of idea, I've found myself back on the topic of thanksgiving. The example Syme uses to explain this is our digestions "going sacredly and silently right." As slightly crude as that is, how often do we thank God for our bodies working correctly? We ask him to fix it when they start doing something wrong just like we ask him to fix our cars and our houses and everything else when they stop working.
I wish it didn't take my own car acting up and having to drive someone else's car to appreciate my car doors working and my car heat being sufficient. It'd be nice if I could remember to thank God for a healthy immune system without having to sit in the doctors office for a few hours first. Perhaps I need to start composing some poetry to the wonders of correctly functioning computers.
