I stumbled across the Chesterton quote in the post above somewhere in my travels. I liked it. I saved it. Yet, with all things Intertunnel, the question arises, "Is it so? Did he really say that?" Curious, the Oracle Google was consulted. According to Google and according to Dale Ahlquist, in Lecture 18: William Blake, Chesterton wrote:
No pure mystic ever loved mere mystery. The mystic does not bring doubts or riddles: the doubts and riddles exist already. We all feel the riddle of the earth without anyone to point it out. The mystery of life is the plainest part of it. The clouds and curtains of darkness, the confounding vapours, these are the daily weather of this world. Whatever else we have grown accustomed to, we have grown accustomed to the unaccountable. Every stone or flower is a hieroglyphic of which we have lost the key; with every step of our lives we enter into the middle of some story which we are certain to misunderstand. The mystic is not the man who makes mysteries but the man who destroys them. The mystic is one who offers an explanation which may be true or false, but which is always comprehensible – by which I mean, not that it is always comprehended, but that it always can be comprehended, because there is always something to comprehend. The man whose meaning remains mysterious fails, I think, as a mystic.
Good enough for me.
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