Wednesday, March 28, 2007

A settling monotony and GK Chesterton's Angry Street

Some days when I drive to work...I almost despair at the monotony of it all, the sameness of the routine, the near mindlessness of the trip...and I wonder if the road I travel on everyday will one day also buck up and just do something totally crazy like the street in GK Chesterton's short story, The Angry Street:

"Yet it was not the wrong street. The name written on it was the same; the shuttered shops were the same; the lamp-posts and the whole look of the perspective was the same; only it was tilted upwards like a lid.
...
"'It is the same with streets. You have worked this street to death, and yet you have never remembered its existence. If you had owned a healthy democracy, even of pagans, they would have hung this street with garlands and given it the name of a god. Then it would have gone quietly. But at last the street has grown tired of your tireless insolence; and it is bucking and rearing its head to heaven. Have you never sat on a bucking horse?'

...

Are the roads of my commute also marking my insolence, my unthinking ways...?

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