{"id":102,"date":"2005-07-07T20:00:42","date_gmt":"2005-07-07T18:00:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.clausmoser.de\/nb\/?p=102"},"modified":"2005-07-08T18:54:28","modified_gmt":"2005-07-08T16:54:28","slug":"the-day-that-was-thursday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/2005\/07\/07\/the-day-that-was-thursday\/","title":{"rendered":"The Day That Was Thursday"},"content":{"rendered":"

Angesichts der Bilder aus London kommt mir eine Passage aus G.K. Chestertons Roman The Man Who Was Thursday<\/em> in den Sinn. Im ersten Kapitel diskutieren zwei Bohemiens, der Anarchist Lucian Gregory und der Held des Buchs, Gabriel Syme, dar\u00fcber, ob der wahre K\u00fcnstler das Chaos oder die Ordnung lieben mu\u00df. Und zur Illustration seiner Thesen zitiert Gregory die Londoner U-Bahn. <\/p>\n

\u201cAn artist is identical with an anarchist,\u201d he cried. \u201cYou might transpose the words anywhere. An anarchist is an artist. The man who throws a bomb is an artist, because he prefers a great moment to everything. He sees how much more valuable is one burst of blazing light, one peal of perfect thunder, than the mere common bodies of a few shapeless policemen. An artist disregards all governments, abolishes all conventions. The poet delights in disorder only. If it were not so, the most poetical thing in the world would be the Underground Railway.\u201d
\n \u201cSo it is,\u201d said Mr. Syme.
\n \u201cNonsense!\u201d said Gregory, who was very rational when anyone else attempted paradox. \u201cWhy do all the clerks and navvies in the railway trains look so sad and tired, so very sad and tired? I will tell you. It is because they know that the train is going right. It is because they know that whatever place they have taken a ticket for that place they will reach. It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!\u201d
\n \u201cIt is you who are unpoetical,\u201d replied the poet Syme. \u201cIf what you say of clerks is true, they can only be as prosaic as your poetry. The rare, strange thing is to hit the mark; the gross, obvious thing is to miss it. We feel it is epical when man with one wild arrow strikes a distant bird. Is it not also epical when man with one wild engine strikes a distant station? Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Bagdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria. No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride. Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories. Give me Bradshaw, I say!\u201d
\n \u201cMust you go?\u201d inquired Gregory sarcastically.
\n\u201cI tell you,\u201d went on Syme with passion, \u201cthat every time a train comes in I feel that it has broken past batteries of besiegers, and that man has won a battle against chaos. You say contemptuously that when one has left Sloane Square one must come to Victoria. I say that one might do a thousand things instead, and that whenever I really come there I have the sense of hair-breadth escape. And when I hear the guard shout out the word \u2018Victoria,\u2019 it is not an unmeaning word. It is to me the cry of a herald announcing conquest. It is to me indeed \u2018Victoria\u2019; it is the victory of Adam.\u201d
\nGregory wagged his heavy, red head with a slow and sad smile.
\n \u201cAnd even then,\u201d he said, \u201cwe poets always ask the question, \u2018And what is Victoria now that you have got there?\u2019 You think Victoria is like the New Jerusalem. We know that the New Jerusalem will only be like Victoria. Yes, the poet will be discontented even in the streets of heaven. The poet is always in revolt.\u201d
\n\u201cThere again,\u201d said Syme irritably, \u201cwhat is there poetical about being in revolt? You might as well say that it is poetical to be sea-sick. Being sick is a revolt. Both being sick and being rebellious may be the wholesome thing on certain desperate occasions; but I\u2019m hanged if I can see why they are poetical. Revolt in the abstract is\u2014revolting. It\u2019s mere vomiting.\u201d <\/p><\/blockquote>\n

„Eine Nachtmahr“ nannte Chesterton seinen Roman im Untertitel. Ihm, dem konservativen Katholiken, ging es zwar noch um die Auseinandersetzung mit einem anderen Terrorismus als dem, der heute nach London gekommen ist: „To abolish God“, nennt Gregory das Ziel seines anarchistischen Geheimbundes,<\/p>\n

„we do not only want to upset a few despotisms and police regulations; that sort of anarchism does exist, but it is a mere branch of the Nonconformists. We dig deeper and we blow you higher. We wish to deny all those arbitrary distinctions of vice and virtue, honour and treachery, upon which mere rebels base themselves. The silly sentimentalists of the French Revolution talked of the Rights of Man! We hate Rights as we hate Wrongs. We have abolished Right and Wrong.“<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Die Al-Qaeda-Bomber m\u00fc\u00dften insofern f\u00fcr Gregory ein extremer Fall von „silly sentimentalists“ sein, schlie\u00dflich geht es ihnen gerade um die Durchsetzung eines besonders rigiden Systems von Right und Wrong. Aber trotzdem hat Chestertons Roman heute eine unheimliche und bizarre Aktualit\u00e4t. Etwa die Anarchistenversammlung, die einen Nachfolger f\u00fcr das verstorbene Mitglied mit dem Codenamen Thursday<\/em> w\u00e4hlen soll. Einer h\u00e4lt zun\u00e4chst den Nachruf und lobt den ehemaligen Kampfgenossen als „heroic worker“:<\/p>\n

As you know, his services to the cause were considerable. He organised the great dynamite coup of Brighton which, under happier circumstances, ought to have killed everybody on the pier. As you also know, his death was as self-denying as his life, for he died through his faith in a hygienic mixture of chalk and water as a substitute for milk, which beverage he regarded as barbaric, and as involving cruelty to the cow. Cruelty, or anything approaching to cruelty, revolted him always.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Aber vor allem ist es das skurrile Spiel von Camouflage und Enttarnung, in dem Chestertons Figuren agieren m\u00fcssen: Die beste Tarnung f\u00fcr einen Anarchisten, sagt Gregory, ist als Anarchist aufzutreten. Der Pr\u00e4sident des Central Anarchist Council „puts all his genius into not being heard of, and he is not heard of“, schw\u00e4rmt er. „But you cannot be for five minutes in the room with him without feeling that C\u00e6sar and Napoleon would have been children in his hands.“ Und am Ende werden alle Mitglieder des Council als Agenten ihrer Majest\u00e4t enttarnt, die quasi den Terrorismus, den sie bek\u00e4mpfen sollten, selbst gez\u00fcchtet haben.<\/p>\n

Chesterton hat sein Buch als Satire verstanden, und im Widmungsgedicht, dass dem Buch vorangestellt ist, glaubt er den Kampf gegen die anarchistischen Sympathien mancher Londoner Bohemiens wohl beendet: „I may safely write it now“, schreibt er, „and you may safely read“. Das Gef\u00fchl der Sicherheit ist f\u00fcr die meisten Londoner heute pass\u00e9, am Tag, an dem die U-Bahn nicht in Victoria ankam.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Angesichts der Bilder aus London kommt mir eine Passage aus G.K. Chestertons Roman The Man Who Was Thursday in den Sinn. Im ersten Kapitel diskutieren zwei Bohemiens, der Anarchist Lucian Gregory und der Held des Buchs, Gabriel Syme, dar\u00fcber, ob der wahre K\u00fcnstler das Chaos oder die Ordnung lieben mu\u00df. Und zur Illustration seiner Thesen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clausmoser.de\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}