Whats With The Title?

Thanks for checking out the new blog.

So why the title “ManAlive”?

Well it happens to be the title of possibly my favorite book. ManAlive by GK Chesterton, if you haven’t read it I highly suggest you add it to the top of your reading list. It is a novel about “Truth, beauty and the goodness of life.”

 (The man himself: GK Chesterton)

I chose this as my title because the main character in the book, Innocent Smith is one of my many heroes.  He is this man who is truly alive and amazed at this world. He refuses to take anything for granted, a good climbing tree, a cheap bottle of wine, his wife, his children, his house, his two legs… NOTHING. He courts and woos his wife again and again, he breaks into his own home to see his own possesions anew, he travels around the world for the purpose of having joy upon returning home. Chesterton elsewhere wrote that "the things we see every day are the things we never see at all." Smith has learned the amazing trick of seeing everything for the first time and so for him his life is full of wonder and awe. What the world finds to be ordinary and dull he finds to be wonderful and amazing...to be alive!


 

“The world will never starve for lack of wonders but for lack of wonder” - GK Chesterton

The biggest tragedy in life is that when we get use to stuff it stops amazing us! Or worse it starts boring us. We do this with things, places, people, and even God. We have lost our sense of gratitude and awe for the simple things in life. If you truly paused to look around at how wonderful this world is and how incredible the gift of life is, I can't help but think that you would be more joyful, grateful, and more alive. People are never amazed anymore by anything. Innocent Smith refuses to let this happen to his life or even his friend’s lives. Whenever his friends are unappreciative or just going through the motions of life he fires his pistol at them to scare them and make them grateful to be alive. He pretends his own property is not his, so he covets his own belongings instead of his neighbors. Whenever he finds himself taking his wife for granted he sends her off to some distant town or place so he can show up again only to court her and propose all over again. The book starts off as a kind of mystery case where there are all these accusations against Smith of polygamy, attempted murder and theft….only to find out through the trial that he is innocent of all of them.

"His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself by every electric shock to the intellect that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.”

"This man’s spiritual power has been precisely this, that he has distinguished between custom and creed. He has broken the conventions, but he has kept the commandments.”

"If Innocent is happy, it is because he IS innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbors goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons. If he had really murdered a man, if he had really deserted a woman, he would not be able to feel that a pistol or a love letter was like a song – at least, not a comic song.”

“He really is happy, because he really is hilarious, because he really is a man alive. He is so young, that climbing garden trees and playing silly practical jokes are still to him what they once were to us all.”

When was the last time you were truly amazed at something? When was the last time you were truly grateful for the blessings in your life? When was the last time you were truly living in the moment?When was the last time you truly felt alive?

So this is why my blog is titled ManAlive, because I hope to live up to the standard that Innocent Smith has made.

So now that my painful first blog is out of the way, I bet you are wondering; “What can I expect from future blogs?”

My blogs will range from Catholic apologetics, books, movies, random rants and thoughts, stories and experiences…basically a little bit of everything. Oh yeah and probably a lot of quotes.  

God Bless,

James