Gilbert Keith Chesterton

“ I am not a person especially prone by nature to be a nuisance in an hotel; I am not a vegetarian; I am not an epicure; I can eat and drink and smoke the ordinary things provided in ordinary places. But if it came to living my life in an hotel, especially that part of my life that is creative in the sense of being personal, I think I should find the list of things on the bedroom clock a little insufficient. For instance, if I have a hobby or a potential hobby, it is probably a toy theatre. ”

“ It is when we pass to the practical difference between a house and an hotel that we come to the creative nature of property. I have taken this figure of speech for convenience and clarity, because I do not think everybody understands what we mean by this creative quality. Now a man in an hotel is entirely receptive. He may receive as many things as an average man in an average house. He may receive more things than most modern men in most modern houses. ”

“ He is considering a balance between particular necessities and particular luxuries which escapes classification; he is ready, so to speak, to live on turnips on a chance of growing tobacco. I mean he is ready to act on a calculation exactly like the turning of a wooden chair into a wooden stage; something at once fantastic and thrifty. Where that power is democratically distributed men are more than citizens, they are all artists.
With this note on the purely creative or spiritual side of property I conclude the sketch I have here attempted against communism. ”

“ But if I had no need to earn my bread and cheese, and no country and no conscience and none of all those nonsensical things, I should settle down with a serious aim in life, which would be working a toy theatre. ”

“ It is only by narrowing itself to locality and privacy that the soul can broaden itself with real imagination and novelty. To listen to all the modern talk about organization and trade and transport is like watching a man wandering about carrying an uprooted tree. ”

“ He cannot add anything to the hotel. If he were to attempt to improve the hotel in any sweeping and striking fashion, his adventures would be somewhat sensational. Rich people in a rich hotel are in one sense protected and too much protected; but though they have protection they have not property. The point, however, is this; that nobody can provide beforehand for the creative needs, as people can provide for the protective need. It is in the nature of any creation that it is in some sense original ”

“ But we may here turn from the fancies about what a man might desire to the facts about what he does desire. The simplest course is for each man to take himself as an example; as a typical and not necessarily an egotistic example. ”

“ One is that the tree may be already dead. The other is that there is only one possible way of seeing it again alive. Only when it is planted finally in one fixed place on the face of the earth, will it ever bear fruit or blossom or become a greenhouse of birds. ”

“ It may even lead to my being removed from that cushioned apartment to a still more cushioned apartment, commonly called a padded cell. But the point here is that the two forms of human comfort and convenience run distinct and parallel; and no increase of the one comes an inch nearer to the other. ”