ON RUNNING AFTER ONE’S HAT.

G.K. Chesterton’s little essay “On Running After One’s Hat” is really a perfect languagehat link. Not only is it about (inter alia) hats, not only does it express very well one of my basic attitudes towards life (and one which makes me a much happier camper than many), but within its folds is nestled a very pearl of linguistic change at work. The two paragraphs that give the essay its name begin, wonderfully, “For instance, there is a current impression that it is unpleasant to have to run after one’s hat. Why should it be unpleasant to the well-ordered and pious mind?” The paragraph continues:

There is an idea that it is humiliating to run after one’s hat; and when people say it is humiliating they mean that it is comic. It certainly is comic; but man is a very comic creature, and most of the things he does are comic—eating, for instance. And the most comic things of all are exactly the things that are most worth doing—such as making love.

We are taken aback: the last sentence is true and apposite, but quite startling in so pious and conservative a writer as Chesterton. We begin to revise our opinion of him. Then we read on: “A man running after a hat is not half so ridiculous as a man running after a wife.” Of course—back then, “making love” meant “courting”! We cease revising our opinion, and commence savoring the dash of hot pepper that has entered the dish while the chef’s back was turned. [Via Chasing Hats, via Gideon Strauss.]

Comments

  1. I have Chesterson’s Orthodoxy, given me by a friend, and was definitely surprised to read the “making love” bit as well. 🙂 It’s sad that I knew that particular definition of “making love”, it just didn’t come immediately to mind.

  2. You should seek out his (long out-of-print) novel, “Manalive!” which opens with a very peculiar man chasing his hat in a wind storm.

    It turns out he is also chasing his wife, and recourting her at frequent intervals to keep the romance alive, among other odd things (like breaking into his own house as a burglar to remind himself of how valuable his home is, and abandoning his family to walk around the world to remind him how much he loves his family).

    It’s a very invigorating and whimsical book.

  3. A couple of decades late: as it happens, Chasing Hats used that as a title of another Chesterton post.

  4. Lars Mathiesen says

    I hate running after my hat, so I bought one with a tether that attaches to my topmost coat button.

    My hat shop has a diploma on its wall celebrating 100 years of being a Borsalino reseller. Issued in 1957.

  5. Now, that’s my kind of hat shop.

  6. jack morava says

    Has the Coen brothers’ film `Miller’s Crossing’

    https://www.rogerebert.com/scanners/the-evolution-of-a-hat

    been discussed here?

  7. As a matter of fact, it has, by one jack morava!

  8. jack morava says

    thanks, sorry; the incredible lightness of memory…

  9. No need to apologize — I do that all the time!

  10. (I should put up a banner at the top of the LH front page: IT HAS BEEN X DAYS SINCE THE LAST DOUBLE POST.)

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