TREMENDOUS TRIFLES

by

G. K. Chesterton






Preface

These fleeting sketches are all republished by kind permission
of the Editor of the DAILY NEWS, in which paper they appeared.
They amount to no more than a sort of sporadic diary--a diary
recording one day in twenty which happened to stick in the fancy--
the only kind of diary the author has ever been able to keep.
Even that diary he could only keep by keeping it in public,
for bread and cheese. But trivial as are the topics they
are not utterly without a connecting thread of motive. As the
reader's eye strays, with hearty relief, from these pages,
it probably alights on something, a bed-post or a lamp-post,
a window blind or a wall. It is a thousand to one that the
reader is looking at something that he has never seen: that is,
never realised. He could not write an essay on such a post or
wall: he does not know what the post or wall mean. He could
not even write the synopsis of an essay; as "The Bed-Post; Its
Significance--Security Essential to Idea of Sleep--Night Felt
as Infinite--Need of Monumental Architecture," and so on.