The Adventure of Being Nobody - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

The Adventure of Being Nobody

My History of the City of London class today discussed white-collar Victorian life, so our assigned reading was a wonderful collection from the humor magazine Punch called The Diary of a Nobody. It chronicles a year in the life of Charles and Carrie Pooter in the 1890s London suburb of Holloway. There’s a certain prosaic quality to it: little happens in their lives of greater note than a poor choice of paint for their bathtub or too close an embrace with a bag of coal.

The rest of the class generally found the story bland. We analyzed the class dynamics and the social anxieties of the book while shying away from the human decisions and emotions that, to me, made it majestic and beautiful and worth reading. For the discipline of history suffers deeply from what Anthony Esolen terms the “subhumanities“: the violent, dehumanizing inclination to reduce people into social categories. Professor SJ Murray, from Baylor University, once told me that to love studying the humanities, I had to first love being human.

G.K. Chesterton

If we don’t love the stories ordinary people tell about their lives, how much do we really love being human? G.K. Chesterton had withering words for the liberal elitism that only would see people only in terms of their labels and forget to listen to their stories. In his “Defense of Penny Dreadfuls,” an apology for the kind of stories of heroism and courage that young boys love, Chesterton illumines the beauty and moral sanity of popular literature. He warns against the educated snobbery that loves to flirt with inhuman ideologies while thinking constantly about class differences:

In this matter, as in all such matters, we lose our bearings entirely by speaking of the “lower classes” when we mean humanity minus ourselves. This trivial romantic literature is not especially plebeian: it is simply human. The philanthropist can never forget classes and callings.

His reminder is especially imperative for Christians. We must never forget the radical thrust of the New Testament, which burst into a Hellenized world where tragedy and epic were reserved for the great and well-born. Only in comedies like Aristophanes’ did ordinary folk get stage time, and then only as buffoons. But the early Christians told stories about a poor maid in Galilee whose heroic self-abnegation launched the climactic act of world history. A country fisherman’s dishonesty when confronted by the firelight outside the high priest’s house proves a climactic moment in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. And the Church, by venerating Mary and Peter and the others down through the ages, reminds us of the heroic adventure that is each and every person’s life and calls us all to take up our crosses and enter into the majesty of that story.

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