Attic time

Every editor should have a well-stocked mental attic, but mine overfloweth and probably needs a good housecleaning.

A writer I'm working with assayed a little thought experiment today, involving a trip to JCPenney during which someone unexpectedly finds himself eating a burger in McDonald's. The writer's point: give people what they expect when they visit your web site. Don't throw them curves.

He's right, of course, but still. . . .

I hadn't read it for 50 years, but I suddenly flashed on an argument between two poets, described by G.K. Chesterton in The Man Who Was Thursday (Boni and Liveright, 1908). One poet, arguing for order, cites the London subway as the most poetical thing in the world. The other, an anarchist, derides him. Why do people look old and tired in the subway, he asks, and then answers: It's because they know exactly where they're going. "It is because after they have passed Sloane Square they know that the next station must be Victoria, and nothing but Victoria. Oh, their wild rapture! oh, their eyes like stars and their souls again in Eden, if the next station were unaccountably Baker Street!"

Chesterton came up right on cue (the book was within reach) when I considered my writer's horror at the idea of rounding a corner in Penney's and suddenly being in McDonald's. "You know," I thought, "that actually would be kind of cool."



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