Flor feroz

Drosophyllum lusitanicum (L.) Link

If one speaks of beasts one thinks first of wild beasts; if of flowers one thinks first of wild flowers. But there are two great exceptions; caught so completely into the wheel of man's civilization, entangled so unalterably with his ancient emotions and images, that the artificial product seems more natural than the natural. The dog is not a part of natural history, but of human history; and the real rose grows in a garden. All must regard the elephant as something tremendous, but tamed; and many, especially in our great cultured centres, regard every bull as presumably a mad bull. In the same way we think of most garden trees and plants as fierce creatures of the forest or morass taught at last to endure the curb. (...)

Nobody seems to be afraid of a wild dog: he is classed among the jackals and the servile beasts. The terrible cave canem is written over man's creation. When we read "Beware of the Dog," it means beware of the tame dog: for it is the tame dog that is terrible. He is terrible in proportion as he is tame: it is his loyalty and his virtues that are awful to the stranger, even the stranger within your gates; still more to the stranger halfway over your gates. He is alarmed at such deafening and furious docility; he flees from that great monster of mildness.

G.K. Chesterton, The Wrath of the Roses (Alarms and Discursions, 1910)

Voto em branco

Anacamptis pyramidalis (L.) Rich.

I crossed one swell of living turf after another, looking for a place to sit down and draw. Do not, for heaven's sake, imagine I was going to sketch from Nature. I was going to draw devils and seraphim, and blind old gods that men worshipped before the dawn of right, and saints in robes of angry crimson, and seas of strange green, and all the sacred or monstrous symbols that look so well in bright colors on brown paper. They are much better worth drawing than Nature; also they are much easier to draw. When a cow came slouching by in the field next to me, a mere artist might have drawn it; but I always get wrong in the hind legs of quadrupeds. So I drew the soul of a cow; which I saw there plainly walking before me in the sunlight; and the soul was all purple and silver, and had seven horns and the mystery that belongs to all beasts. (...)

But as I sat scrawling these silly figures on the brown paper, it began to dawn on me, to my great disgust, that I had left one chalk, and that a most exquisite and essential chalk, behind. I searched all my pockets, but I could not find any white chalk. Now, those who are acquainted with all the philosophy (nay, religion) which is typified in the art of drawing on brown paper, know that white is positive and essential. I cannot avoid remarking here upon a moral significance. One of the wise and awful truths which this brown-paper art reveals, is this, that white is a color. It is not a mere absence of color; it is a shining and affirmative thing, as fierce as red, as definite as black. When, so to speak, your pencil grows red-hot, it draws roses; when it grows white-hot, it draws stars. (...)

Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel, or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen.

G. K. Chesterton, A Piece of Chalk (de Tremendous Trifles, 1909)

Erva-das-nuvens

Sanicula europaea L.


Sanicula azorica Guthn. ex Seub.

The Greeks were right when they made Apollo the god both of imagination and of sanity; for he was both the patron of poetry and the patron of healing. G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy, 1908)

Insanos, quase não fotografámos esta herbácea ao vê-la tão pequenina e com inflorescências que nos pareceram de asterácea: capítulos de uma dezena de flores masculinas na periferia e uma ou duas flores hermafroditas ao centro. De facto, trata-se de umbelas: as flores exteriores, com cinco pétalas brancas de cerca de 3 mm de comprimento, são pediceladas e formam um "guarda-chuva" aberto. E afinal esta planta é parente da cenoura (Daucus carota L.), da salsa (Petroselinum sativum L. Mill.) e da cicuta (Conium maculatum L.), e útil como as duas primeiras: a infusão das folhas, com aroma a coentro, é ainda hoje recomendada como antiséptico e expectorante.

A sanícula é uma planta perene, rizomatosa, que requer prados húmidos e sombrios em bosques de montanha, mas não é caprichosa quanto ao substrato. Da Península Ibérica, prefere o norte - e na serra do Açor, onde a encontrámos, só ocorre na Mata da Margaraça (a julgar pelo livro A flora da Serra do Açor, de Paulo Cardoso da Silveira). As folhas, quase todas em ramalhete basal e com pecíolos curvados que nem sachos, são palmadas com cinco a sete lóbulos. A floração decorre entre Abril e Julho e os frutos são cerdosos (vêm-se dois numa das fotos).

O género Sanicula abriga duas espécies europeias, a S. europaea (da Europa, Ásia Menor e norte de África) e a S. azorica, um endemismo açoriano conhecido como erva-do-capitão, de habitats permanentemente encharcados (a chamada zona das nuvens), presente em poucos locais e quase sempre em populações pequenas. Diferem pouco na fotografia, mas de facto a açoriana é muito mais alta e tem folhas maiores com dentes aguçados nas margens.

Sanicula é um diminutivo do latim sanu, que alia o são ao sisudo.

Dia-com-santos

Ophiopogon jaburan Lodd.

Some time ago I wrote a little book of this type and shape on St. Francis of Assisi; and some time after (I know not when or how, as the song says, and certainly not why) I promised to write a book of the same size, or the same smallness on St. Thomas Aquinas. The promise was Franciscan only in its rashness; and the parallel was very far from being Thomistic in its logic. You can make a sketch of St. Francis: you could only make a plan of St. Thomas, like the plan of a labyrinthine city.


(...) St. Francis was a lean and lively little man; thin as a thread and vibrant as a bowstring; and in his motions like an arrow from the bow. All his life was a series of plunges and scampers: darting after the beggar, dashing naked into the woods, tossing himself into the strange ship, hurling himself into the Sultan tent and offering to hurl himself into the fire. In appearance he must have been like a thin brown skeleton autumn leaf dancing eternally before the wind; but in truth it was he that was the wind.


St. Thomas was a huge heavy bull of a man, fat and slow and quiet; very mild and magnanimous but not very sociable; shy, even apart from the humility of holiness; and abstracted, even apart from his occasional and carefully concealed experiences of trance or ecstasy. St. Francis was so fiery and even fidgety that the ecclesiastics, before whom he appeared quite suddenly, thought he was a madman. St. Thomas was so stolid that the scholars, in the schools which he attended regularly, thought he was a dunce. Indeed, he was the sort of schoolboy, not unknown, who would much rather be thought a dunce than have his own dreams invaded, by more active or animated dunces.


This external contrast extends to almost every point in the two personalities. It was the paradox of St. Francis that while he was passionately fond of poems, he was rather distrustful of books. It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas that he loved books and lived on books. (...) When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, "I have understood every page I ever read." St. Francis was very vivid in his poems and rather vague in his documents; St. Thomas devoted his whole life to documenting whole systems of Pagan and Christian literature; and occasionally wrote a hymn like a man taking a holiday. They saw the same problem from different angles, of simplicity and subtlety; St. Francis thought it would be enough to pour out his heart to the Mohammedans, to persuade them not to worship Mahound. St. Thomas bothered his head with every hair-splitting distinction and deduction, about the Absolute or the Accident, merely to prevent them from misunderstanding Aristotle.


Every saint is a man before he is a saint; and a saint may be made of every sort or kind of man; and most of us will choose between these different types according to our different tastes. But I will confess that, while the romantic glory of St. Francis has lost nothing of its glamour for me, I have in later years grown to feel almost as much affection, or in some aspects even more, for this man who unconsciously inhabited a large heart and a large head, like one inheriting a large house, and exercised there an equally generous if rather more absent-minded hospitality. There are moments when St. Francis, the most unworldly man who ever walked the world, is almost too efficient for me.


(...) The saint is a medicine because he is an antidote. Indeed that is why the saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age. Yet each generation seeks its saint by instinct; and he is not what the people want, but rather what the people need. This is surely the very much mistaken meaning of those words to the first saints, "Ye are the salt of the earth". (...) Christ did not tell his apostles that they were only the excellent people, or the only excellent people, but that they were the exceptional people; the permanently incongruous and incompatible people; and the text about the salt of the earth is really as sharp and shrewd and tart as the taste of salt. It is because they were the exceptional people, that they must not lose their exceptional quality. "If salt lose its savour, wherewith shall it be salted?"(...) If the world grows too worldly, it can be rebuked by the Church; but if the Church grows too worldly, it cannot be adequately rebuked for worldliness by the world.

G.K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas (1933)

Floresta de nuvens

Morro Assombrado - ilha Terceira

What are here called the Gods might almost alternatively be called the Day-Dreams. To compare them to dreams is not to deny that dreams can come true. To compare them to traveller's tales is not to deny that they may be true tales, or at least truthful tales. In truth they are the sort of tales the traveller tells to himself. All this mythological business belongs to the poetical part of men. It seems strangely forgotten nowadays that a myth is a work of imagination and therefore a work of art. It needs a poet to make it.

The point of the puzzle is this: that all this vagueness and variation arise from the fact that the whole thing began in fancy and in dreaming; and that there are no rules of architecture for a castle in the clouds. The crux and crisis is that man found it natural to worship; even natural to worship unnatural things. The posture of the idol might be stiff and strange; but the gesture of the worshipper was generous and beautiful. He not only felt freer when he bent; he actually felt taller when he bowed. We therefore feel throughout the whole of paganism a curious double feeling of trust and distrust. There seems a disproportion between the priest and the altar or between the altar and the god. The priest seems more solemn and almost more sacred than the god.

We know the meaning of all the myths. We know the last secret revealed to the perfect initiate. And it is not the voice of a priest or a prophet saying 'These things are.' It is the voice of a dreamer and an idealist crying, 'Why cannot these things be?'

G.K. Chesterton, Man and Mythologies (The Everlasting Man, 1925)

Flor das pedreiras

Inula montana L.

The word comradeship just now promises to become as fatuous as the word "affinity." There are clubs of a Socialist sort where all the members, men and women, call each other "Comrade." I have no serious emotions, hostile or otherwise, about this particular habit: at the worst it is conventionality, and at the best flirtation. I am convinced here only to point out a rational principle. If you choose to lump all flowers together, lilies and dahlias and tulips and chrysanthemums and call them all daisies, you will find that you have spoiled the very fine word daisy. If you choose to call every human attachment comradeship, if you include under that name the respect of a youth for a venerable prophetess, the interest of a man in a beautiful woman who baffles him, the pleasure of a philosophical old fogy in a girl who is impudent and innocent, the end of the meanest quarrel or the beginning of the most mountainous love; if you are going to call all these comradeship, you will gain nothing, you will only lose a word. Daisies are obvious and universal and open; but they are only one kind of flower.

G.K. Chesterton, What's wrong with the world (1910)

Tílias limianas

Tilia tomentosa Moench

Some little time ago I stood among immemorial English trees that seemed to take hold upon the stars like a brood of Ygdrasils. As I walked among these living pillars I became gradually aware that the rustics who lived and died in their shadow adopted a very curious conversational tone. They seemed to be constantly apologizing for the trees, as if they were a very poor show. After elaborate investigation, I discovered that their gloomy and penitent tone was traceable to the fact that it was winter and all the trees were bare. I assured them that I did not resent the fact that it was winter, that I knew the thing had happened before, and that no forethought on their part could have averted this blow of destiny. But I could not in any way reconcile them to the fact that it was winter. There was evidently a general feeling that I had caught the trees in a kind of disgraceful deshabille, and that they ought not to be seen until, like the first human sinners, they had covered themselves with leaves. So it is quite clear that, while very few people appear to know anything of how trees look in winter, the actual foresters know less than anyone.

G.K. Chesterton, The Defendant (1901)

Outono, ano sexto

Quinta de Santo Inácio

It is admitted, one may hope, that common things are never commonplace. (...) It is best perhaps to take in illustration some daily custom we have all heard despised as vulgar and trite. Take, for the sake of argument, the custom of talking about the weather. Stevenson calls it "the very nadir and scoff of good conversationalists". Now there are very deep reasons for talking about the weather, reasons that are delicate as well as deep; they lie in layer upon layer of stratified sagacity. First of all it is a gesture of primeval worship. The sky must be invoked; and to begin everything with the weather is a sort of pagan way of begining everything with prayer. (...) Then it is an expression of that elementary idea in politeness - equality. For the very word politeness is only the Greek for citizenship. (...) All good manners must obviously begin with the sharing of something in a simple style. Two men should share an umbrella; if they have not got an umbrella, they should at least share the rain, with all its rich potentialities of wit and philosophy. (...) This is the second element in the weather; its recognition of human equality in that we all have our hats under the dark blue spangled umbrella of the universe. Arising out of this is the third wholesome strain in the custom; I mean that it begins with the body and with our inevitable bodily brotherhood. All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. (...) Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

G.K. Chesterton, What's wrong with the world (1910)

A inteligência das flores

Cypripedium parviflorum var. pubescens (Willd.) Knight (Pantufas de senhora)

The position of Maeterlinck* in modern life is a thing too obvious to be easily determined in words. It is, perhaps, best expressed by saying that it is the great glorification of the inside of things at the expense of the outside. There is one great evil in modern life for which nobody has found even approximately a tolerable description: I can only invent a word and call it "remotism". It is the tendency to think first of things which, as a matter of fact, lie far away from the actual centre of human experience. Thus people say, "All our knowledge of life begins with the amoeba". It is false; our knowledge of life begins with ourselves. Thus they say that the British Empire is glorious, and at the very word Empire they think at once of Australia and New Zealand, and Canada, and Polar bears, and parrots and kangaroos, and it never occurs to any one of them to think of the Surrey Hills.

The one real struggle in modern life is the struggle between the man like Maeterlinck, who sees the inside as the truth, and the man like Zola, who sees the outside as the truth. A hundred cases might be given. We may take, for the sake of argument, the case of what is called falling in love. The sincere realist, the man who believes in a certain finality in physical science, says, "(...) what it is, is an animal and sexual instinct designed for certain natural purposes". The man on the other side, the idealist, replies, with quite equal confidence, that this is the very reverse of the truth. I put it as it has always struck me; he replies, "Not at all.(...) What it is, beyond all doubt of any kind, is a divine and sacred and incredible vision". The fact that it is an animal necessity only comes to the naturalistic philosopher after looking abroad, studying its origins and results, constructing an explanation of its existence, more or less natural and conclusive. The fact that it is a spiritual triumph comes to the first errand boy who happens to feel it.

Maeterlinck's appearance in Europe means primarily this subjective intensity; by this the materialism is not overthrown: materialism is undermined. He brings, not something which is more poetic than realism, not something which is more spiritual than realism, not something which is more right than realism, but something which is more real than realism. He discovers the one indestructible thing. This material world on which such vast systems have been superimposed - this may mean anything. It may be a dream, it may be a joke, it may be a trap or temptation, it may be a charade, it may be the beatific vision: the only thing of which we are certain is this human soul.

This human soul finds itself alone in a terrible world, afraid of the grass. It has brought forth poetry and religion in order to explain matters; it will bring them forth again. It matters not one atom how often the lulls of materialism and scepticism occur; they are always broken by the reappearance of a fanatic. They have come in our time: they have been broken by Maeterlinck.

G. K. Chesterton, Varied types (1903)

* Maurice Maeterlinck (1862-1949), Prémio Nobel da Literatura em 1911, autor do ensaio L’Intelligence des fleurs (1907) e, entre muitos outros títulos, de Serres chaudes (1889, poemas musicados por Ernest Chausson), Pelléas et Mélisande (1892, peça adaptada a ópera com a música de Claude Debussy) e Ariane et Barbe-Bleue (1901, libreto da ópera com o mesmo nome e música de Paul Dukas).

The stone stood still

Braga (Bom Jesus)

The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about (...). Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, 'Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?' But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.

G.K.Chesterton, Heretics (1905)

The prologue of the tree

Castanheiros na Mata da Margaraça (Serra do Açor, Arganil)

Mr. Walter Windrush, the eminent and eccentric painter and poet, lived in London and had a curious tree in his back-garden. This alone would not have provoked the preposterous events narrated here. Many persons, without the excuse of being poets, have planted peculiar vegetables in their back-gardens. The two curious facts about this curiosity were, first that he thought it quite remarkable enough to bring crowds from the ends of the earth to look at it; and, second, that if or when the crowds did come to look at it, he would not let them look.

To begin with, he had not planted it at all. Oddly enough, it looked very much as if he had tried to plant it and failed; or possibly tried to pull it up again, and failed again. Cold classical critics said they could understand the pulling up better than the putting in. For it was a grotesque object; a nondescript thing looking stunted or pollarded in the manner recalling Burnham Beeches, but not easily classifiable as vegetation. It was so squat in the trunk that the boughs seemed to spring out of the roots and the roots out of the boughs. The roots also rose clear of the ground, so that light showed through them as through branches, the earth being washed away by a natural spring just behind. But the girth of the whole was very large; and the thing looked rather like a polyp or cuttle-fish radiating in all directions. Sometimes it looked as if some huge hand out of heaven, like the giant in Jack and the Beanstalk, had tried to haul the tree out of the earth by the hair of its head.

G.K.Chesterton, Four faultless felons (Dover, 1989)

Erva-borboleta

Orchis papilionacea L.

It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless.

G.K. Chesterton, Chesterton on Dickens, Ignatius Press (1989)

Orquídeas da Serra dos Candeeiros (3)

Anacamptis pyramidalis

«The essential idea of Distributism is the idea of Directness. It concerns direct ownership, direct expression, direct creation and control. We do not say we are in favour of entirely abolishing indirect action. We do say that the modern world is entirely abolishing direct action. We do not say there ought to be no such thing as a cactus or an orchid grown in Kew Gardens, at the public expense for the public instruction. We do say that there will soon be no such thing as a cabbage really grown by private enterprise for private use (...) if we continue in our present direction; which might rather be called an indirection, seeing that it is in the direction of everything that is not direct.

It is assumed to be an intrinsic improvement that a man should grow a cabbage, cart a cabbage, sell a cabbage, and then take an omnibus to another town to buy another cabbage, instead of eating the cabbage he has grown. But we say that if everything depends on exchange, everything will depend on the rulers of exchange; and if everything depends on carting, we are putting the cart before the horse and the horse above man. It is only by the permanent potentiality of growing and eating the cabbages, that we may hope that the feeding of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

The cabbage is whirled away on a great wheel from the man who has grown it, and returns to him after having gone the whole round of the official process of taxation, public expenditure, and public trade. Some think that the cabbage looks a little forlorn, and even slightly soiled or damaged, when it comes back out of that far-reaching machinery. (...) That sort of thing is inevitable but instructive: the instant a thing moves from home, out of the direct influence of its maker, it accumulates a dust or accretion of slightly alien things; and by the time it reaches its remote destination, it is not the thing that was sent forth.

It is so with the voice; it is so with the vote; it is so with the return in mere money for effort or expenditure; it is so in a comparatively trivial matter like the writing of a book, as compared with the printing or binding of a book. This is not, of course, a reason for not binding books or completing ordinary processes of civilization. (...) It is a reason for preserving deliberately a normal life that shall be more narrow and more genuine; in which we can argue with the men we have really met and enjoy the things we have really made.»

G. K. Chesterton, On Direct Action (1928)

As portas do Paraíso

Kensal Green - Londres

......My friends, we will not go again or ape an ancient rage,
......Or stretch the folly of our youth to be the shame of age,
......But walk with clearer eyes and ears this path that wandereth,
......And see undrugged in evening light the decent inn of death;
......For there is good news yet to hear and fine things to be seen,
......Before we go to Paradise by way of Kensal Green.

......G. K. Chesterton, The Rolling English Road (1914)

No passado mês de Abril, a junta de Baguim do Monte, em Gondomar, comunicou a todos os habitantes da freguesia e demais possíveis interessados que, até final da semana, seriam cortados os eucaliptos que tinham crescido junto ao muro do cemitério «e cujas copas invadiam e sujavam as campas». A remoção de tais empecilhos era desejo antigo do povo local, finalmente consumado graças ao tacto e elevação com que a junta tratou do assunto e à atitude colaborante dos proprietários das árvores. (Comunicado completo n'A Sombra Verde.)

Se, por artes do Maligno, se desse tal reviravolta no espaço-tempo que a mesma junta de freguesia se visse com o cemitério de Kensal Green à sua guarda, é de crer que os nossos autarcas desfalecessem de horror ainda antes de porem mãos à obra: árvores grandes e muitas, alimentado-se dos mortos e lançando ao chão cascatas de imundíssimas folhas; vegetação rompendo por entre pedras tumulares quebradas, abraçando lápides caídas ou em desequilíbrio; relvados há muito por aparar; e, por todo o lado, a exuberância indecorosa das flores silvestres. Mas em pouco tempo o brio arboricida luso faria o seu trabalho; e Kensal Green ficaria tão despido e asséptico como o cemitério de Baguim do Monte - ou, para ficarmos por Londres, como o cemitério católico de St. Mary, que com ele confina a poente.



Kensal Green - Londres

Inaugurado em 1833, Kensal Green foi o primeiro cemitério de Londres a ser concebido como jardim. [Essa mesma ideia, importada de França, inspirou os cemitérios portuenses do Prado do Repouso (1839) e de Agramonte (1855) - os quais, apesar de menos frondosos do que deveriam ser, contrastam vivamente, pela muita vegetação que acolhem, com o típico cemitério português.] Desenvolvendo-se simetricamente, com caminhos de terra batida, ao longo de um eixo longitudinal pontuado por uma rotunda arborizada, ocupa um terreno de 29 hectares na zona postal NW10, entalado entre Harrow Road e o braço do Grand Union Canal que segue até Paddington. Entre sepultados e cremados, foi a última morada de mais de 250 mil pessoas, e continua até hoje em funcionamento. Não é um cemitério para elites, embora muita gente famosa lá tenha sido enterrada (não foi esse, porém, o caso de Chesterton). Harrow Road e os bairros contíguos são pobres e pouco atraentes: a mistura étnica que potenciou o sucesso de Notting Hill não fez aqui brotar lojas trendy nem despoletou qualquer boom turístico.

Tudo somado, Kensal Green é dos sítios mais bonitos de Londres. É um lugar de morte mas também de esperança; um lugar onde a vida se perpetua na folhagem nova das árvores, no canto insistente das aves, na azáfama miúda dos insectos. Encontrei lá borboletas, pássaros e flores como em nenhum outro parque londrino. Pude admirar árvores soberbas: tílias (1.ª foto), carvalhos, áceres, azinheiras, castanheiros-da-Índia (2.ª foto), faias, carpas e até um sobreiro, coisa rara nestas latitudes. A nível do solo, o amarelo dos ranúnculos disputava a primazia a uns bluebells miscigenados, hesitantes entre o azul, o branco e o rosa (3.ª foto). E não havia campa que a natureza se houvesse descurado de enfeitar com flores frescas.

Amores-quase-perfeitos

Viola alba / Viola riviniana

«An adventure is, by its nature, a thing that comes to us. It is a thing that chooses us, not a thing that we choose. Falling in love has been often regarded as the supreme adventure, the supreme romantic accident. In so much as there is in it something outside ourselves, something of a sort of merry fatalism, this is very true. Love does take us and transfigure and torture us. It does break our hearts with an unbearable beauty, like the unbearable beauty of music. But in so far as we have certainly something to do with the matter; in so far as we are in some sense prepared to fall in love and in some sense jump into it; in so far as we do to some extent choose and to some extent even judge - in all this falling in love is not truly romantic, is not truly adventurous at all.

In this degree the supreme adventure is not falling in love. The supreme adventure is being born. There we do walk suddenly into a splendid and startling trap. There we do see something of which we have not dreamed before. Our father and mother do lie in wait for us and leap out on us, like brigands from a bush. Our uncle is a surprise. Our aunt is, in the beautiful common expression, a bolt from the blue. When we step into the family, by the act of being born, we do step into a world which is incalculable, into a world which has its own strange laws, into a world which could do without us, into a world that we have not made. In other words, when we step into the family we step into a fairy-tale.»

G. K. Chesterton, On the institution of the family (1905)

Da família Asae

Cauda-de-andorinha (Papilio machaon)

«The other day I was nearly arrested by two excited policemen in a wood in Yorkshire. I was on a holiday, and was engaged in that rich and intrincate mass of pleasures, duties, and discoveries which for the keeping off of the profane we desguise by the exoteric name of Nothing. At the moment in question I was throwing a big Swedish knife at a tree, practising (alas, without success) that useful trick of knife-throwing by which men murder each other in Stevenson's romances.

Suddenly the forest was full of two policemen; there was something about their appearance in and relation to the greenwood that reminded me, I know not how, of some happy Elizabethan comedy. They asked what the knife was, who was I, why I was throwing it, what my address was, trade, religion, opinions on the Japanese war, name of favourite cat, and so on. They also said I was damaging the tree; which was, I am sorry to say, not true, because I could not hit it. The peculiar philosophical importance, however, of the incident was this. After some half-hour's animated conversation, the exhibition of an envelope, an unfinished poem, which was read with great care, and, I trust, with some profit, and one or two other subtle detective strokes, the elder of the two knights became convinced that I really was what I professed to be, that I was a journalist, that I was on the Daily News (this was the real stroke; they were shaken with a terror common to all tyrants), that I lived in a particular place as stated, and that I was stopping with particular people in Yorkshire, who happened to be wealthy and well-known in the neighbourhood.

In fact the leading constable became so genial and complimentary at last that he ended up by representing himself as a reader of my work. And when that was said, everything was settled. They acquitted me and let me pass.

I was certainly accused of something which was either an offence or was not. I was let off because I proved I was a guest at a big house. The inference seems painfully clear; either it is not a proof of infamy to throw a knife about in a lonely wood, or else it is a proof of innocence to know a rich man.»

G. K. Chesterton, Some policemen and a moral (1904)

Mundo em balanço

«What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things - existence, energy, fruition - are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and women are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, or stones to make an idol, or corn to make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent speciality and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed.»
G. K. Chesterton (1910)

São Francisco e a árvore sua irmã

Foto: pva 0410 - Parque das Termas de Vizela

G. K. Chesterton, na sua biografia de São Francisco de Assis, explica que o santo não era, no sentido vulgar da expressão, um amante da natureza: em vez de um encantamento panteísta pela natureza no seu conjunto, ele amava separadamente cada pássaro, cada árvore, cada insecto; para ele a natureza não era um cenário indiferenciado, mas antes um teatro frenético onde, em lances dramáticos, cada ser vivo fazia ressaltar a sua personalidade.

«The hermit might love nature as a background. Now for St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. (...) He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. (...) In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother or sister of man.» (G. K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi, 1923)

Para São Francisco a sua irmã árvore era um maior hino à glória do Criador do que uma sumptuosa catedral. Por isso consigo imaginá-lo a conversar com cada uma das tílias desta alameda no Parque de Vizela, seguindo com os olhos as folhas secas que o Outuno incipiente vai fazendo tombar. E imagino também o seu desgosto ao deparar, ainda em Vizela, com outras tílias menos felizes, amputadas para não taparem a fachada da igreja: diria o santo que nem os homens de Deus são imunes à vaidade de preferirem obra humana à criação divina. Quem ordenou essas podas talvez seja indiferente mesmo à natureza como cenário, pois só um sentido estético embotado pode achar que um tal agrupamento de árvores grotescas tem efeito ornamental. Mas esses pobres destroços testemunham, pior do que a indiferença, a perversão egoísta do sadismo.

A canção do carvalho

SONG OF THE OAK

The druids waved their golden knifes
And danced around the Oak
When they sacrificed a man;
But though the learned search and scan
No single modern person can
Entirely see the joke.
But though they cut the throats of men
They cut not down the tree,
And from the blood the saplings sprang
Of oak-woods yet to be.
But Ivywood, Lord Ivywood,
He rots the tree as ivy would,
He clings and crawls as ivy would
About the sacred tree.

Great Collingwood walked down the glade
And flung the acorns free,
That oaks might still be in the grove
As oaken as the beams above,
When the great Lover sailors love
Was kissed by death at sea.
But though for him the oak-trees fell
To build the oaken ships,
The woodman worshipped what he smote
And honoured even the chips.
But Ivywood, Lord Ivywood,
He hates the tree as ivy would,
As the dragon of the ivy would
That has us in his grips.

G. K. Chesterton (1874-1936)

---------------------------------------

(Dedicado a todos os fautores do nosso progresso)