The Ball and The Cross
The Ball and The Cross
The adventures of two men, one an atheist, the other a Catholic, who want to fight a duel over God and the Virgin Mary. The world thinks them both mad, of course, because they seem to be serious, and the story ends by shutting up in a lunatic asylum all the people who are sane enough to care one way or another about their quarrel.
Book Excerpt
oment, in the front of an interminable line of palings,
when his eyes were opened. Not a light shifted, not a leaf
stirred, but he saw as if by a sudden change in the eyesight that
this paling was an army of innumerable crosses linked together
over hill and dale. And he whirled up his heavy stick and went at
it as if at an army. Mile after mile along his homeward path he
broke it down and tore it up. For he hated the cross and every
paling is a wall of crosses. When he returned to his house he was
a literal madman. He sat upon a chair and then started up from it
for the cross-bars of the carpentry repeated the intolerable
image. He flung himself upon a bed only to remember that this,
too, like all workmanlike things, was constructed on the accursed
plan. He broke his furniture because it was made of crosses. He
burnt his house because it was made of crosses. He was found in
the river."
Lucifer was looking at him with a bitten lip.
"Is that story really true?" he asked.
"Oh, no," said Michae
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I found startling the point that society is moving torward the view that all religious belief is personal, that faith should not be held as a perspective on an external truth (Otherwise, one might say that another man is wrong in his beliefs). What it shows is that Postmodernism was already at work even in his time, though Modernism was considered the driving force behind the two World Wars and the Holocaust.
Otherwise, it is an amusing tale of two enemies who just can't seem to find a private place where they might kill each other. If it isn't the interference of people, then it's the interference of nature. The plot is absurd enough to point at the fatalism behind it.
Otherwise, it is an amusing tale of two enemies who just can't seem to find a private place where they might kill each other. If it isn't the interference of people, then it's the interference of nature. The plot is absurd enough to point at the fatalism behind it.
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A very entertaining treatment of the battle of ideas within the secular and the sacred played out within two men's stylized duel. I found the beginning and ending of the book a little hard to follow, perhaps incongruous at times, but the body of the novel is humorous as well as thought provoking. I've been reading a lot of GKC of late and this ranks with his best works. Highly recommended.
07/14/2009
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