I WAS reading a blog the other day in which a young woman stated that she loves Lady Gaga. The pop star, she said, makes her “feel alive.”  This is to be expected as the fans of Lady Gaga are half alive. Here is an apt quote from G.K. Chesterton’s Everlasting Man:

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a Red Indian. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad oriental religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

                                                      — Comments —

Sage McLaughlin writes:

That is my favorite Chesterton quote. It was a revelation to me when I first read it, years ago, and it has always stuck with me. It’s easy to forget sometimes how deep the disease had gone already by the time he wrote it. Thanks very much for sharing it with all your readers.

Laura writes:

You are welcome. Thanks to the reader who reminded me of this quote. Chesterton does a nice job of cutting through the psychotherapeutic nonsense of our time.

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