I’ve long been familiar with the thing that G.K. Chesterton is reported to have said, that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing poorly… “While you practice” was the explanatory clause to tack on if necessary; but it doesn’t seem to me likely that Chesterton would have added it. Because it makes a false distinction between the present and some future time, assumed to be qualitatively different… But who decides if you’re doing the thing for real or just practicing?
My son’s Suzuki violin teacher used to beg us not to use the word practice at all. She would ask her students, “Did you play your violin every day?” and we parents were supposed to speak after the same fashion. Even if no one saw evidence of improvement in musicianship on a given day, we were all encouraged to be satisfied nonetheless, because “You played. That’s good.”
What Chesterton did say, which is included in the whole article linked at bottom, is that “Somebody must renounce all specialist conquests, that she may conquer all the conquerors.” He calls the uproarious amateurishness of the universe “true sanity,” which sounds good, because it’s essentially how I myself approach life.
His hearty approval of what he sees as the way of women confirms to me that G.K. and I have the same personality style. But I’m not sure all of us women are alike in this… Do you think that some women actually prefer to be more focused, or specialized, in their pursuits? To the women reading this, I wonder if you feel that his statements below ring true of you. Chesterton has a very high opinion of the female sex, but how many women did he really know that well?
“There was a time when you and I and all of us were all very close to God; so that even now the color of a pebble (or a paint), the smell of a flower (or a firework), comes to our hearts with a kind of authority and certainty; as if they were fragments of a muddled message, or features of a forgotten face. To pour that fiery simplicity upon the whole of life is the only real aim of education; and closest to the child comes the woman—she understands. To say what she understands is beyond me; save only this, that it is not a solemnity. Rather it is a towering levity, an uproarious amateurishness of the universe, such as we felt when we were little, and would as soon sing as garden, as soon paint as run.
“To smatter the tongues of men and angels, to dabble in the dreadful sciences, to juggle with pillars and pyramids and toss up the planets like balls, this is that inner audacity and indifference which the human soul, like a conjurer catching oranges, must keep up forever. This is that insanely frivolous thing we call sanity. And the elegant female, drooping her ringlets over her water-colors, knew it and acted on it. She was juggling with frantic and flaming suns. She was maintaining the bold equilibrium of inferiorities which is the most mysterious of superiorities and perhaps the most unattainable. She was maintaining the prime truth of woman, the universal mother: that if a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly.”
— G.K. Chesterton, from What’s Wrong with the World, the chapter on “Folly and Female Education.”
Gladsome Lights 