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About The Pedestrian
Published four times annually, The Pedestrian celebrates the variety and wonder of life, inviting readers and writers to explore more attentively the ordinary, everyday facets of their experience. We invite them to walk through familiar territory as if first encountering it. These quarterly walks take an approach different from standard intellectual publications, which race through reports, analyses, and persuasion while too often presenting multifaceted lives in mere glosses and stock narratives. Instead, we propose a leisurely saunter through our quarterly topics, equipped with an eye for detail, an awareness of the overlooked, and an empathetic curiosity about the people and the things encountered.
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g. k. chesterton on the commonplace
In contemplating some common object of the modern street, such as an omnibus or a lamp-post, it is sometimes well worth while to stop and think about why such common objects are regarded as commonplace. It is well worth while to try to grasp what is the significance of them – or rather, the quality in modernity which makes them so often seem not so much significant as insignificant. … Even if you try to grasp the lamp-post, in your effort to grasp its significance, you will almost certainly be misunderstood. … As for the idea of a lamp-post, the idea of a fixed beacon of the branching thoroughfares, the terrestrial star of the terrestrial traveler, it not only could be, but actually is, the subject of countless songs.
… Another way of explaining the cloud of commonplace interpretation upon modern things is to trace it to that spirit which often calls itself science but which is more often mere repetition. It is proverbial that a child, looking out of the nursery window, regards the lamp-post as part of a fairy-tale of which the lamplighter is the fairy. That lamp-post can be to a baby all that the moon could possibly be to a lover or a poet. Now, it is perfectly true that there is nowadays a spirit of cheap information which imagines that it shoots beyond this shining point, when it merely tells us that there are nine hundred lamp-posts in the town, all exactly alike. … And we can say of [this] calculation that there is nothing really commonplace except the mind of the calculator. The baby is much more right about the flaming lamp than the statistician who counts posts in the street; and the lover is much more really right about the moon than the astronomer. Here the part is greater than the whole, for it is much better to be tied to one wonderful thing than to allow a mere catalogue of wonderful things to deprive you of the capacity to wonder.
— from “Lamp-Posts,”
in The Uses of Diversity: A Book of Essays
(New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1921)
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