Chesterton says seriousness is a vice. I have been (over?) committing it for many years.

This blog has settled down into the brown study with considerable enthusiasm: Beckett’s silences, De Quincey’s labyrinths, Weil’s severity, the weight of Hardy’s every word. I have taken my reading gravely because it was the easiest thing to do; solemnity flows out of men naturally, and it flowed out of me in over a thousand posts.

The posts I most enjoyed writing were the lighter ones: imagining which writers needed Elizabeth Bowen, dismissing Montevideo in eighty-eight words, the parlour games and the short sharp verdicts. These came faster, required more discipline, and left less room for the comfortable posture of the serious reader thinking seriously about serious books.

I do not intend to become funny; the brown study is my temperament and I have no plans to redecorate. What I notice, reading Chesterton, is that the lightness and the seriousness were never opposites. His five greatest words in Orthodoxy: “Satan fell by the force of gravity,” are a joke, a pun, a piece of theology, and a sword-thrust, all at once; the leap and the thought are the same movement. De Quincey’s digressions do this too: serious thought refusing to take itself gravely. Plutarch tells you a man conquered half the known world and then mentions he was fond of figs.

More of that. The blue sky was always there.