“A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.” I came upon this remark of G.K. Chesterton’s last week by accident. Someone commenting on a blog had quoted it. I can’t remember now what blog it was, or what the post and comment were in reference to. But I had copied the quote because I thought I might want to write about it. And the more I pondered it, the more disturbing it seemed.

This did not surprise me. Chesterton can be that way. Though often dismissed by critics as the glib deviser of facile paradoxes, there is more weight to his writing than the surface levity suggests. Had Chesterton’s barbs been aimed, as his friend Shaw’s were, at fashionable targets rather than used in defense of what he called orthodoxy, Chesterton would be taken every bit as seriously as Shaw.

In fact, there is often a great deal more depth in Chesterton than there is in Shaw (there is a reason why Shaw is now better remembered for My Fair Lady than for Pygmalion). In Chesterton, as in the paintings of Fragonard, games are being played, but looming clouds are likely to be casting ominous shadows.

Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday, about a group of anarchists who take as aliases the names of weekdays, is a peculiar fiction. Peculiarly disturbing, that is. For all the high spirits and wit that lace it, there is a kind of menacing undertone to it. I was not at all surprised to learn recently that Chesterton wrote it to deal with chronic, well-nigh crippling melancholy.

But back to the quote. I think what attracted me to it was that I saw “going with the stream” as referring to the “current of opinion” and that Chesterton was sending a word of encouragement to contrarians. I soon thought better of that.

I suppose you could, of course, if you were giving a talk about the “climate of opinion,” figure out some way to make use of Chesterton’s quote. But to do so, I now realize, would not only be superficial, but wrong. Chesterton’s epigram is one in which the imagery is inextricably bound to the meaning. The stream connects the clauses, but the subject under discussion is dead things versus living things. To reduce Chesterton’s remark to a commonplace about the dangers of uncritically accepting the conventional wisdom is to miss its point, perhaps even illustrate it. After all, few things can be more deadening than to reduce life to politics.

The image the sentence should bring to mind is that of a salmon struggling against the current of the stream on its way to spawn. The point is that, so long as we live, we are surrounded, like a fish in water, by a medium of being that is pressing always against us, and that to cease struggling against that pressure means to die.

This quote, in fact, is irreducible. Like a poem, it means only what it says precisely as it says it. It cannot be translated into a platitude. It can, however, serve as a trigger to contemplation, reminding us that life runs counter to entropy. The inorganic compounds may be tending toward states of molecular symmetry, but the chemistry of the carbon compounds tells a different story.

In this year of Darwin, we will hear much of what evolution has “done.” But evolution has “done” nothing. Evolution is an abstract noun used to describe what life, from its beginning, has done. It is organisms that live, adapt, and evolve. In Consciousness Reconsidered, neurobiologist Owen Flanagan speculates as to “why Mother Nature would have selected a mind with capacities for robust phenomenological feel in the sensory modalities” and says “the capacity to experience pleasure and pain is a design solution that Mother Nature has often used in different lineages of locomoting organisms.”

This is reification, pure and simple, the “thingification” of an idea. There is no Mother Nature “selecting” anything or arriving at any “design solutions.” Take away the personification, and what is Flanagan talking about?

Life.

So was Chesterton. Only he knew how to keep his metaphors in order, and didn’t confuse the stream with the fish.

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Frank Wilson

Frank Wilson was the book editor for the Philadelphia Inquirer until his retirement in 2008. He blogs at Books, Inq.

Latest posts by Frank Wilson (Posts)

• An illusion of precision - September 9, 2015
• Watching the passing scene - October 28, 2013
• To see like a child - June 26, 2013
• Riffing and digressions - January 21, 2013
• Life is a parenthesis between one darkness and another - September 13, 2012

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