DIRECTIONS FOR WRITING
Think of something you do that gives you real pleasure: that is your subject. Your object is to lead other people to share in what pleases you.
Intimate, as the author does, what various thrills may be experienced. Write enthusiastically, and, if possible, with charm. Do not command your reader, but entice him into the joys that you possess. Give a supporting quotation from some one whose words will be respected.
FOOTNOTES:
[4] Marcus Aurelius (121-180). A Roman emperor and soldier, author of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, a book of such wise and kindly philosophy that it is still widely popular.
THE FURROWS[5]
By GILBERT K. CHESTERTON
(1874). One of the greatest of living English essayists. He is notable for originality of thought and expression. His habit of turning ideas, as it were, “upside-down,” makes his work peculiarly challenging. He has written under many types of literature. Among his books are Robert Browning; Charles Dickens; Heretics; Tremendous Trifles; Alarms and Discursions; The Victorian Age in Literature.
Many essays are like poems: from some subject that lies well within common experience they spring to a height of emotion. Such is the case with the essay that follows. Mr. Chesterton looked upon an ordinary plowed field. At once his imagination took fire and he saw in the field a significance, a beauty, that the everyday observer might not note. It is the interpretation of what Carlyle calls “the ideal in the actual” that makes Mr. Chesterton's essay so appealing.
As I see the corn grow green all about my neighborhood, there rushes on me for no reason in particular a memory of the winter. I say “rushes,” for that is the very word for the old sweeping lines of the plowed fields. From some accidental turn of a train-journey or a walking tour, I saw suddenly the fierce rush of the furrows. The furrows are like arrows; they fly along an arc of sky. They are like leaping animals; they vault an inviolable hill and roll down the other side. They are like battering battalions; they rush over a hill with flying squadrons and carry it with a cavalry charge. They have all the air of Arabs sweeping a desert, of rockets sweeping the sky, of torrents sweeping a watercourse. Nothing ever seemed so living as those brown lines as they shot sheer from the height of a ridge down to their still whirl of the valley. They were swifter than arrows, fiercer than Arabs, more riotous and rejoicing than rockets. And yet they were only thin straight lines drawn with difficulty, like a diagram, by painful and patient men. The men that plowed tried to plow straight; they had no notion of giving great sweeps and swirls to the eye. Those cataracts of cloven earth; they were done by the grace of God. I had always rejoiced in them; but I had never found any reason for my joy. There are some very clever people who cannot enjoy the joy unless they understand it. There are other and even cleverer people who say that they lose the joy the moment they do understand it. Thank God I was never clever, and could always enjoy things when I understood them and when I didn't. I can enjoy the orthodox Tory, though I could never understand him. I can also enjoy the orthodox Liberal, though I understand him only too well.