Wall Street Journal Op-Ed: My Dog, My Car and G.K. Chesterton, by Mike Kerrigan (J.D. Virginia; Partner, Hunton Andrews Kurth, Charlotte, NC):
My 14-year-old son recently sent me a photo of our dog, Sugaree, taken last December as she was squired about town. It had to have been her 1,000th car trip, but looking at her, you’d think it was her first. With her windswept head stretched far out the car window, she seemed a canine Gen. Patton scanning the horizon in the race to Messina.
Such boundless joy in a car ride called to mind something I’d read by G.K. Chesterton. In his 1908 book, “Orthodoxy,” Chesterton wrote: “Grown-up people aren’t strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony.”
This was so, Chesterton ventured, because God has the “eternal appetite of infancy,” and perhaps it “may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them.” …
To wonder is to see the big in the small. So long as there is wonder, there is no room for monotony. That truth is what grown-ups often miss, but all innocents—dogs, children or God himself—haven’t forgotten. The outlook, a good tonic for our dangerously fractious times, is worth recovering. …
Sugaree, my intrepid pet, sees repetition in God’s creation not as mere recurrence but as theatrical encore. Simply by following her lead, perhaps I can approach my place in the cosmos for the wondrous adventure it is.
Prior TaxProf Blog coverage:
- One Year Later . . . (Paul Caron) (June 2, 2024)
- One Week Later . . . (Paul Caron) (June 9, 2023)
- Josie Shands Caron (2007-2023) (Paul Caron) (June 4, 2023)
- Dogs, God, And Love (NY Times op-ed) (Mar. 26, 2023)
- Our Dog, Who Art In Heaven (WSJ op-ed) (Jan. 7, 2023)
- Saying Farewell to a Dog Is Never Easy (NY Times op-ed) (Mar. 24, 2011)
- Our Christmas Dog (Paul Caron) (Dec. 25, 2009)
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