This Islam/ Comic controversy is boiling on and doesn't seem to be calming down, but here's something that caught my eye in the meantime. Chesterton's "On Reading" is a fun little work that I found over on a Torrey chum's blog. Ryan's a nice guy I had the priviledge of sharing class with one semester in Torrey.

The article is Chesterton arguing for the sake of reading. His argument is that by continuing to read we will continue to tap into the great store of thought left us from the past, and that this will prevent heresies: ideas that are taken out of their context and clung to at the expense of the Whole Truth (and nothing but). Here's the witty cite:

In case this point is not clear, I will take two examples,
both in reference to notions fashionable among some of the more
fanciful and younger theorists. Nietzsche, as every one knows,
preached a doctrine which he and his followers regard apparently as
very revolutionary; he held that ordinary altruistic morality had been
the invention of a slave class to prevent the emergence of superior
types to fight and rule them. Now, modern people, whether they agree
with this or not, always talk of it as a new and unheard-of idea.
It is calmly and persistently supposed that the great writers of the past,
say Shakespeare for instance, did not hold this view, because they
had never imagined it; because it had never come into their heads.
Turn up the last act of Shakespeare's Richard III and you will
find not only all that Nietzsche had to say put into two lines,
but you will find it put in the very words of Nietzsche.
Richard Crookback says to his nobles:

Conscience is but a word that cowards use,
Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

As I have said, the fact is plain. Shakespeare had thought of Nietzsche
and the Master Morality; but he weighed it at its proper value
and put it in its proper place. Its proper place is the mouth of a
half-insane hunchback on the eve of defeat. This rage against the weak
is only possible in a man morbidly brave but fundamentally sick;
a man like Richard, a man like Nietzsche. This case alone ought
to destroy the absurd fancy that these modern philosophies are modern
in the sense that the great men of the past did not think of them.
They thought of them; only they did not think much of them.
It was not that Shakespeare did not see the Nietzsche idea;
he saw it, and he saw through it.

Reading Nietzche senior year, and then in Richard III in the same semester had me wondering that Shakespeare could have written about Nietzche before Nietzche ever arose, but of course, Chesterton has hit the nail on the head here, and resolved for me this mystery.

Thank you, Chesterton, thank you very much.