The person with large ideas

I thought I'd post a little more Chesterton, this time from Heretics and a chapter called On Mr Rudyard Kipling and Making the World Small. It’s curious, because whenever I have heard the proverb mentioned, I have thought it was in said in favour of the rolling stone, but Chesterton seems to be suggesting otherwise. And yet, if I’d ever thought about it, I’d personally rather be the moss-gathering stone than the rolling one. This passage speaks to my yearning for a slower and simpler life in many ways, and I definitely do feel more alive when I have time to just be and to reflect and go deeper, without needing to roll on from one thing to the next. But here it is:

The more dead and dry and dusty a thing is the more it travels about; dust is like this and the thistle-down and the High Commissioner in South Africa. Fertile things are somewhat heavier, like the heavy fruit trees on the pregnant mud of the Nile. In the heated idleness of youth we were all rather inclined to quarrel with the implication of that proverb which says that a rolling stone gathers no moss. We were inclined to ask, "Who wants to gather moss, except silly old ladies?" But for all that we begin to perceive that the proverb is right. The rolling stone rolls echoing from rock to rock; but the rolling stone is dead. The moss is silent because the moss is alive.   The truth is that exploration and enlargement make the world smaller … The telescope makes the world smaller; it is only the microscope that makes it larger  … The man standing in his own kitchen-garden, with fairyland opening at the gate, is the man with large ideas.

It’s a nice excuse for my enjoyment of gardening. (The plant pictured is called 'happy wanderer', which has gone very happily wandering up my fence.)