Assorted retorts from yahoo boards and elsewhere: Replying to advice from Cameron Riecker · Mentor / Mentoree Dynamics Changing with Age Pyramid · New blog on the kid: Is There Traditional Property in the Digital Sphere? · To Whoever Tries to Tell Me I Write "Wrong" (Not Meaning I Am Wrong About a Subject, Which Would be a Matter for a Debate)
What No One Tells You About Writing as an Author Over 40
Best Serving Author | 31 Oct. 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1T9JdNgBZe8
A question, Sir.
Does Young Earth Creationism add value to your life?
If it does, I think you should care. Whether you believe it's correct, are curiously on the fence or passionately opposed, but not into the marginalising tactics.
If it doesn't, you are not the kind of person (I don't mean "mental type" or "genomic type", I mean social type) whom I'm writing for, and so you are not in a position to tell me whether my writing will or won't add something to someone's life.
Oh, I'm solving more than one problem in Young Earth Creationism ...
I'm Politely Begging You to Write Nonfiction
Writing with Andrew | 21 July 2025
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIP_hLaLnLo
It seems you have a tendency to limit essay writing to personal (real life) experience.
I HAVE heard a story, which I have never verified either by history or topography, otherwise known as being on the spot, to the effect that the French Academy accepted the accident of the absence of Molière from its records with a magnificent gesture. It may have been only a tradition about something that somebody planned to do; it may even have been only a tale of somebody about what ought to be done; but it is exactly the sort of tradition that would represent the nation; and it is exactly the sort of thing that Frenchmen would or could have done. The French Academy, founded by Richelieu for the establishment of classical literature in the country, naturally passed over a wandering play-actor and playwright like Molière; just as Oxford and Cambridge would have passed over a wandering play-actor and playwright like Shakespeare. But here the story, even if it is only a story, strikes the note that only the French can strike. For it was said that the French Academy erected in its inner courts a special statue of Molière, with the inscription “Rien ne manque à sa gloire; il manque à la notre” ... and if you want to know what is the difference between the atmosphere of France and England, both of them very jolly atmospheres in their way, you have only to imagine anybody making, or even anybody suggesting, a public apology of that sort to Shakespeare. Can you imagine a huge statue of Shakespeare in Balliol Quad, inscribed with the statement, “Shakespeare never went to Balliol.” Can you conceive even Cambridge rearing a colossal monument to Dickens, to celebrate the fact that he never had a University education — or indeed any other education? If that story about Molière is true, or even if it is a true parable or fable, there is an obvious moral to the fable. The English rather ignore defeats; the French rather exaggerate defeats; but the French do sometimes have the talent of snatching victories out of defeats.
I HOPE it is not a secret arrogance to say that I do not think I am exceptionally arrogant; or if I were, my religion would prevent me from being proud of my pride. Nevertheless, for those of such a philosophy, there is a very terrible temptation to intellectual pride, in the welter of wordy and worthless philosophies that surround us to-day. Yet there are not many things that move me to anything like a personal contempt. I do not feel any contempt for an atheist, who is often a man oflimited and constrained by his own logic to a very sad simplification. I do not feel any contempt for a Bolshevist, who is a man driven to the same-negative simplification by a revolt against very positive wrongs. But there is one type of person for whom I feel what I can only call contempt. And that is the popular propagandist of what he or she absurdly describes as Birth-Control.
LAST year, the representative of all that remains of the Holy Roman Empire was murdered by the barbarians. As an atrocity it has been adequately denounced; and it breeds in some of us rather a dumb sort of disgust, almost as if it had been done not by barbarians but by beasts. Perhaps the only further fact to be noted, on that side, is the fact that this is the only kind of effort in which these clumsy people are not merely clumsy. The Nordic man of the Nazi type in Germany is a very slow thinker, and incredibly backward and behind the times in science and philosophy. That is why, for instance, he clings to the word “Aryan,” as if he were his own great-grandfather laboriously poring over the first pages of Max Muller, under the concentrated stare of the astounded ethnologists of later days. He is slow in a great many things; as, for instance, in releasing prisoners who are admittedly innocent; or in answering questions put by foreign critics or Catholic bishops. We have good reason to know that he is slow in paying his debts; to the point of ceasing to pay them. He is very slow in bringing about the Utopia that he promised to the German people; the complete financial stability and the total disappearance of unemployment. He is slow in a thousand things, from the length of his meals to the lengthiness of his metaphysics. But in one thing he is not slow but almost slick. He is swift to shed innocent blood; he really has a certain technique in the matter of murdering other people; and the prospect of this sport alone can move him to an animation that is almost human. Hitler really killed quite a creditable number of people for one week-end holiday; and the assassination of Dollfuss did show some touch of that efficiency, which the Nazis once promised to display in other fields of activity
These incipits are from three essays within The Well and the Shallows, an essay collection by Gilbert Keith Chesterton.
He is NOT speaking about his personal experience, or only tangentially, like in introducing the subject (I have heard a story).
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