AT THE SIGN OF THE WORLD’S END
A Chesterton Radio Column Inspired by G.K. Chesterton’s New Witness Essays
In his celebrated New Witness column, G.K. Chesterton often began with the smallest of things—a street corner, a shop sign, a passing conversation—and ended by illuminating something much larger about human nature, imagination, faith, or civilization.
This recurring Chesterton Radio series follows that same path.
Each essay begins with something ordinary and asks whether it may be more important than it appears.
The other evening I was walking down a quiet street after dark when I noticed something that ought not to have detained me for more than a moment and yet managed to accompany me for several days afterward. It was one of those ordinary sights that are so ordinary that they become invisible until, for some reason unknown even to themselves, they step forward and demand attention.
The evening had settled gently over the town. The shops were closed. A faint breeze moved the leaves along the curb with the sort of sound that suggests a conversation among very old people. Somewhere a screen door closed. Somewhere else a dog barked once and then reconsidered the matter. The streetlights stood at their appointed stations like patient sentries who had long ago abandoned any expectation of excitement.
Most of the houses were dark.
A few windows remained illuminated.
And in one of those windows sat a man beside a lamp.
There was nothing dramatic about him. He was not engaged in a struggle with destiny. He was not composing a masterpiece or discovering a continent. He sat in a chair with the ease of a man who had occupied chairs before and expected to occupy them again.
Beside him stood a radio.
Not a television.
Not a glowing tablet.
Not a telephone shining with messages from distant lands.
A radio.
I remember slowing my pace slightly as I passed. Not because the sight was strange but because it seemed strangely familiar. It reminded me of something I could not immediately identify. Like hearing a melody from childhood and remembering the feeling before remembering the song.
I continued walking, but the image remained.
Now there are many reasons a lighted window may attract attention. Travelers have always been fascinated by windows. An illuminated window viewed from a dark street possesses a peculiar mystery. A palace may reveal everything and tell us nothing. A cottage window reveals almost nothing and makes us wonder about everything.
One sees only fragments.
A lamp.
A table.
A curtain.
A silhouette.
Yet the mind immediately begins constructing a story.
Who lives there?
What are they discussing?
Are they expecting a visitor?
Have they just received good news?
Or bad?
Are they lonely?
Are they content?
Do they know that a stranger has paused outside and imagined an entire existence from the sight of a chair and a lamp?
There are moments when it seems that half of human life consists of wondering about the unseen halves of other lives.
Indeed, I have sometimes suspected that curiosity is less a vice than a tribute. We become curious about people because we recognize that they possess worlds we cannot enter. The old lady watering flowers on her porch has memories no historian possesses. The young mechanic tightening bolts in a garage contains hopes invisible to every passing automobile. Every human being carries a kingdom concealed beneath an ordinary hat.
Perhaps that is why windows are so interesting.
A window is not merely an opening in a wall.
It is an invitation to the imagination.
And this, though I did not realize it at the time, may have had something to do with the man beside the radio.
But before we come to him, it is worth considering another mystery.
Why do people enjoy windows at all?
For modern civilization appears determined to eliminate them.
I do not mean physical windows. We continue constructing those, though often with less enthusiasm than accountants construct spreadsheets. I mean windows as instruments of wonder.
There was a time when a man stood at a window to see what might be happening outside.
Today he frequently stands before a screen to see what might be happening inside another screen.
The change is subtle.
Yet it is curious.
A traveler once crossed oceans to see foreign lands.
Now he sometimes photographs a foreign land before he has actually looked at it.
I once observed a tourist photographing a sunset with such concentration that he scarcely glanced at the sunset itself. He appeared determined to preserve an experience he had not quite experienced.
This is not a criticism.
It is merely one of those odd developments that occur when human beings invent marvelous tools and then become slightly confused about what the tools are for.
A telescope helps us see stars.
It is not a substitute for stars.
A camera helps us remember a moment.
It is not a substitute for a moment.
Likewise, pictures help us see things.
But they are not substitutes for seeing.
And there are occasions when a thing seen indirectly becomes less vivid than a thing imagined.
This sounds absurd at first.
Yet it explains why a child can become terrified by a shadow in a hallway and remain entirely unimpressed by a million-dollar special effect.
The shadow requires participation.
The special effect does not.
The imagination must complete one picture.
The other arrives fully assembled.
Now I realize that I am drifting rather far from the man in the window. But then, perhaps not. One of the advantages of wandering through a small town after dark is that every street eventually meets another street, and most thoughts possess a similar tendency.
The truth is that the image remained in my mind because it seemed to belong simultaneously to two different centuries.
The radio looked old.
The man did not.
The chair did not.
The lamp did not.
Only the radio appeared out of fashion.
Yet the longer I considered it, the less certain I became that the radio was the outdated object in the room.
It may be that something else has become old-fashioned.
Listening.
There was once an inventor—at least I imagine there was, though perhaps he exists only for the purposes of this column—who devoted his life to helping people imagine things.
He built a machine that projected pictures.
Then he built a machine that projected moving pictures.
Then he built a machine that projected moving pictures with sound.
Then he built a machine that projected moving pictures with sound and scents.
Then he built a machine that projected moving pictures with sound, scents, vibrations, temperature changes, and mechanical gusts of wind.
At last he unveiled his greatest invention.
It reproduced every sensation associated with climbing a mountain.
The audience emerged exhausted.
One gentleman approached the inventor and asked a simple question.
“Did anyone imagine the mountain?”
The inventor stared.
He had spent thirty years replacing imagination and had forgotten to ask whether imagination was the thing people wanted.
This imaginary inventor is ridiculous.
Which is precisely why he resembles the rest of us.
For we frequently assume that adding more information automatically produces more experience.
Sometimes it does.
Sometimes it merely produces more information.
And somewhere along these reflections I began to understand why the image of the man beside the radio remained so persistent.
