G. K. Chesterton: Alarms and Discursions

Overall I wasn't too impressed with this book, basically all the other collections of Chesterton's essays I'd read were better. Still, there are some good chapters, most notably perhaps The New House. In this one, GKC managed over just a few pages to mention the human tendency to go from one extreme to the opposite one, apply it to people escaping from overcrowded cities to places hardly inhabited at all, and conclude that, like most things in our lives, decent housing is a matter of balance between two extremes - in this case, between having your neighbours too near to and too far from you. (Personally I've always regretted that as an unbeliever I couldn't be a monk, with a cell and thus private space of my own, yet a member of a community of men.)