"He could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion... They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality. Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky. Syme felt a simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that he had walked so near to London. He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl."
- The Man Who was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton
I just finished reading that book for maybe the third time (the quote is from the very end), and... well, I don't feel rash calling it the best book I've ever read. At first thought, it seems ironic that the reason I read the book was that there were various passages of it scattered throughout the world of Deus Ex; but the more I think about it, the more the two seem to go hand in hand. If I were ever to talk to one of the designers of that game, the first question I'd ask would be how much influence The Man Who was Thursday, thematically, had on the game. (One obvious and perhaps crass example that comes to mind is the bit of the game where J.C. Denton is given a code to type into a seeming broken telephone in a secluded booth, and the elevator twists around and descends into an NSF hideout. It seems very similar to Syme's descent into the anarchists' lair.) The sheer attitudes of the game, the blending of the mundane and the colossal, the thoughts that flow through one's mind as one stares up into the pre-dawn sky of Hong Kong... that game was a work of genius. It had its lackluster bits, without a doubt; some parts where it was all shooting and sneaking. But taken as a whole, it was unforgettable.
And as for the book... hilarious, profound, fantastic, compelling - containing all the best things about literature, and happily devoid of the ideological, point-pushing crap with which curriculum designers are apparently smitten.
The complete online text of The Man Who was Thursday can be found here; extensive information about and textual content from Deus Ex is located here.
posted on Thursday, August 28, 2003
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