How, and How not, to Love a Place
In ‘The Napoleon of Notting Hill,’ G.K. Chesterton shows us the ropes.
For all the noise and dumpster fires, our time in history is milder than most.
Even when it doesn’t act like it.
That being said, some of us seem to be doing much better than the places around us.
Over the last year, urban neighborhoods in the United States took a round of beatings. Though it’s no Times Square, tree-studded, walkable Midtown Sacramento makes a decent exhibit of what happened.
Starting with the first stay-at-home order, the healthy, educated, and mostly 25 to 40 year old residents in my neighborhood immured themselves in their apartments.
Almost overnight, places like J street—a walkable thoroughfare of shops, bars and restaurants that brims with life most evenings—became ghost towns. Before long, a few doors closed, the first casualties in what would soon become a mass graveyard of dead businesses, nationwide.
Then at the end of May, the hurricane struck.
Although we were spared the outright occupation of some places, my wife and I watched into the early A.M. as parts of Sacramento exploded. Even J street, a place with even less connection to the inciting incident than the far-fetched but nonetheless targeted prisons, courts, and federal buildings, was smashed to pieces.
Right on cue, the apologists rolled in.
While I can’t recall who first said it, one excuse seemed to summarize all of them, standing tall as it threw the usual shade on any challengers.
Who cares about destroyed buildings when people are dying? People are more important than property.
It’s potent stuff.
Even among those who pooh-poohed the riots, the slogan drew limited rebuttal.
As far as optics go, it’s a knockout. Who on earth wouldn’t save a young child from a burning house and leave the Xbox? Buildings, like property, are replaceable, whereas people are not. If we look closely, there’s more going on here—a naïve compartmentalization, (as if people’s lives and the buildings, neighborhoods and places they inhabit are in no way tied together) and a gutsy assumption of moral pretext, based on victimhood.
For all the narrative casting, we’d be hard pressed to find a better thesis of what’s happened to our cities, parks, and even shuttered schools. Applied broadly to toppled statues, record-high crime and reckless violence, (when exhausted police forces are villainized and defunded, what else should we expect?) and open-air drug use encroaching on elementary schools, putting people over places explains all too much.
If people are more important than buildings, then why not let them go crazy?
Why not throw small businesses, police precincts, and whole neighborhoods to the wolves? After all, aren’t they just relics of a racist, oppressive, earth-polluting society? Perfect fodder for a pandemic reset, Marie Kondo style?
But while people over places goes unchallenged, a little pivoting on its core assumption, breaks the axle.
Put one way:
-People (that is… BLM supporters and masses of young people, grounded from work and school for months on end…) are more important than buildings and property.
And another:
-People (… the long-oppressed proletariat and their Red Army enforcers) are more important that the property of Kulak farmers.
Now buckle up:
-People (…long-suffering Germans) are more important that property and neighborhoods of Jewish residents.
-People (…frightened wartime Americans) are more important than the property of Japanese residents.
It wears out pretty fast—just like any system with moral relativism at its heart.
When the only fun is wearing the victim hat, the party’s doomed. And a free pass for one group’s rage means no group is safe.
As Theodore Dalrymple points out, when buildings and neighborhoods take a hit, the damage rains down everywhere. Those closest are hit first, but the flooding spreads to everyone, wiping out those in struggling neighborhoods with no margin for error. A fleeting glance at any Venezuela, Beirut, Cuba, or Detroit reminds us that damage to places can last decades, or longer.
It’s encouraging to watch ordinary citizens—angry parents, restaurant owners, nail saloon workers and the like—standing up to the insanity.
But if places are also abstract concepts, as much nodes of interactions, choices, visions and opportunities as they are brick or sidewalk—then an abstract defense, rippling out through social circles and reaching spheres of influence, is long overdue.
By throwing out the people over places maxim and drilling down to the spiritual roots of patriotic, (as opposed to envious, rage-fueled) motivation, there’s a world of divine wonder, a beaten path to be walked again and again.
As we’ll see in the The Napoleon of Notting Hill, it’s a kind of patriotism that loves and defends no matter what, forgiving flaws but always pressing for improvement.
And who other than Gilbert Keith Chesterton, a merry critic and lifelong urbanite, to lead the way?
Enter the Prophet
Although he died in 1936, G.K. Chesterton wouldn’t bat an eye at 2020. He wouldn’t be surprised to find us ass over teakettle, taking orders from brand new shamans, (experts, activists, diversity czars…), worshipping at brand new altars, full-tilt.
To him, madness was everywhere. But kernels of truth lay in seeing ordinary things, people, places with imagination.
While any summary of his life as an author, erudite, proud Roman Catholic and roaring Christian apologist wouldn’t do him justice, the novel’s first pages (The Napoleon of Notting Hill was his first) give a sound introduction to the prophet of mirth.
Right from the first sentence, it’s a mind unlike any other:
“The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children’s games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up.”1
While this sounds like a sly diss of the turn-of-the-century ‘grown-ups’ he would famously debate—modernists, Darwinian atheists, and socialists like George Bernard Shaw—it’s actually bedrock:
“For human beings, being children, have the childish willfulness and the childish secrecy... Individually, men may present a more or less rational appearance, eating, sleeping, and scheming. But humanity as a whole is changeful, mystical, fickle, delightful. Men are men, but Man is a woman.” (1)
For Chesterton, our childish tendencies are much closer to our humanity, much more a summation of who we are than any scientific or sociological prognosis.
Flashy ideas come and go. But men, women, families, traditions, humor, imagination, fairy tales, children’s games—what the experts see as trivial, (or increasingly, malleable), Chesterton saw as markers of sanity, sacred boundary stones as timeless as the Church, as startling as the resurrection.
It’s a solid cornerstone, perfect for a whimsical novel or an entire way of thinking.
While his voice carries this reverence, it’s also light, deft. It threads arguments while nudging for a laugh—at its own expense or anyone else’s.
“…Some speak lightly and loosely of insanity as attractive. But a moment’s thought will show that if disease is beautiful, it is generally someone else’s disease.”2
“A man who says that no patriot should attack the Boer War until it is over is not worth answering intelligently; he is saying that no good son should warn his mother off a cliff until she has fallen over it.”
It’s not hard to imagine Chesterton, (all 268 pounds of him) just like his contemporaries described—scattered, disheveled, round as a globe, wandering London with his cape, swordstick and cigar, lost in some rollicking adventure. Between writing eighty books and over a thousand articles, the prophet missed trains, wrote ideas down on scraps of paper, arrived late to packed lecture halls and won the crowd over by laughing at his own jokes.
During the First World War, after poor shape and health disqualified from service, an elderly woman recognized him on the street. When she demanded to know why he wasn’t at the front with everyone else, his response was perfect:
“Madam, if you will step around this way a little, you will see that I am.”
Is there a faster draw in church history?
As far as impressions go, Chesterton looms larger than life—an intellectual force who dueled with opponents, then invited them to the pub. He wrote like a madman but left no defining masterpiece, inspiring C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Orwell and countless others.
It’s no surprise that The Napoleon of Notting Hill has two protagonists: a jester turned King named Auberon Quinn and a warrior named Adam Wayne.
They’re two halves of the same person.
Players, Setup, Sacred Colors
When it first came out in 1904, The Napoleon of Notting Hill confused critics. Even today, the genre itself—a cheerful, fable-crossed dystopia—doesn’t really compute.
Just like Orwell’s dark masterpiece, Chesterton sets his dreary future in the year 1984. But rather than everything sliding into a drab, nightmarish North Korea, (a society whose bones and personality Orwell predicted to a T), the author’s future London is plain, congenial, ‘almost exactly like what it is’ when he wrote the novel.
Conquered by the triumph of evolution, social sciences and consumer-driven progress, his future is one with no zest for life. Democracy, upheaval, and patriotic feeling are long forgotten. A flaccid ruling class calls the shots, making improvements and picking a new King every so often—not that anyone cares.
Around the world, smaller countries have been more or less absorbed into the ruling powers. We learn this when three hum-drum Government officials (Auberon Quinn is introduced as ‘the short one’) meet the exiled President of Nicaragua.
In a memorable scene that’s all heart and whimsy, the President kicks things off.
Overcome by a strange longing, he staggers over to a yellow poster, pulls out his penknife, and slices off a strip. After asking the officials if they have any red, (they don’t), the president reaches over and stabs his own hand, using the gushing blood to color a handkerchief scarlet. He pins the yellow strip and the bloody cloth to his green suit, side by side. When the stunned officials sit the President down for an explanation, he tells them that red and yellow are his colors, the sacred emblem of his country.
To their prompt reply that Nicaragua is no longer a country, the President explains that his homeland is in an idea, an essence, an infatuation that can’t be shaken off.
“Senor, you asked me why, in my desire to see the colors of my country, I snatched at paper and blood. Can you not understand the ancient sanctity of colors?…Wherever there is a field of marigolds and the red cloak of an old woman, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a field of poppies and a yellow patch of sand, there is Nicaragua. Wherever there is a lemon and a red sunset, there is my country. If there be yellow mud and red mud in the same ditch, it is better to me than white stars.” (1)
Here, with a brief monologue from a minor character, Chesterton plants a flag.
The scene captures something local denizens, from mountain villagers to football tailgaters to flag-wearing veterans, know deep in their bones—and what millionaire take-a-knee athletes feel compelled to take a dump on.
Colors mean something—they bubble over enough with feeling and memory, enough to capture a place’s hopes, history, and collective memory. Here again, the ordinary isn’t ordinary. Patriotic feeling is mysterious and universal, a strong echo of something sacred.
The officials are baffled, but Quinn is enthralled. He sees the whole episode as Pythonesque, a splendid joke for breaking up the monotony all around him.
When Quinn is chosen to be the next King, he makes tomfoolery into public policy. Clothes backward, he dances around, speaking in banter, forcing disinterested subjects to play along.
And in a second scene worth looking at, he passes the baton to a young boy named Adam Wayne, who makes the novel by taking a joke all too seriously.
Enter Napoleon
In a brief scene that shows Chesterton’s heart on his sleeve, (along with child’s games, he loved children—it broke his heart that he and his wife Frances Hogg couldn’t have any), King Quinn stumbles across a young lad playing war in the streets of London’s Notting Hill neighborhood.
Imagining he’s Napoleon, the lad jabs the King’s back with a wooden sword. When the King turns around, he’s delighted by what he sees.
As an idea for the ultimate joke percolates, Quinn coronates young Adam Wayne:
“Infant,” he said. “I’m glad you are so stalwart a defender of your old inviolate Notting Hill. Look up nightly to that peak, my child, where it lifts itself among the stars so ancient, so lonely, so unutterably Notting. So long as you are ready to die for the sacred mountain, even if it were ringed with all the armies of Bayswater,” (1)
The moment’s a catalyst for both of them—shaping Wayne’s calling and passion well into adulthood, and prompting Quinn to begin a complete restructuring of London. Later that night, the King hashes out the Charter of the Cities, a proclamation forcing Kensington, Chelsea, Battersea—each of London’s distinct neighborhoods—to build boundary walls, roll out Medieval banners, and govern themselves as city states.
Everyone rolls their eyes, but goes along with it.
Years later, when Quinn’s old comrades Barker and Lambert seek permission to demolish Pump Street, (a tiny section of Notting Hill), for a transit bypass, a grown Adam Wayne, now a Provost, strolls into court.
He’s angelic, dignified, decked out in red and gold with a sword at his side—patriotism personified. Ready to fight from day one, Wayne refusing larger and larger buyouts, baffling the officials and even Quinn himself.
When the King asks if it’s all a joke, Wayne replays the moment they met:
“It was your Majesty who first stirred my dim patriotism into flame. Ten years ago, when I was a boy, I was playing on the slope of Pump Street, with a wooden sword and a paper helmet, dreaming of great wars. In an angry truce I struck out with my sword, and stood petrified, for I saw that I had struck you, sire, my King, as you wandered in a noble secrecy, watching over your people’s welfare. But I need have had no fear. Then was I taught to understand Kingliness. You neither shrank nor frowned. You summoned no guards... But in august and burning words, which are written in my soul, never to be erased, you told me ever to turn my sword against the enemies of my inviolate city. Like a priest pointing to the altar, you pointed to the hill of Notting,” (1)
As Adam Wayne coronates Quinn in return, the King starts to understand what Chesterton found, refined, and shared with all who would listen:
There’s deep truth in practical jokes—even the accidental ones.
And if courageous passion and humor are twin wellsprings, both flowing from the Creator himself, then something’s off when they’re in short supply. In a stale, grown-up world, (as much our own as the intellectual climate Chesterton faced), the best that experts, governments, and egalitarian visionaries can do—aside from fanning the flames—is stamp out joy and laughter.
The novel escalates to some simmering battle scenes. As much the fierce warrior as he looks, Wayne rallies the lowly citizens of Notting Hill, plans his strategy, and repels invaders sent to build the bypass. As the officials fail, their armies collapsing like Persians at the pass of Thermopylae, Quinn howls with laughter.
It’s a splendid whirlwind, a gale of action, color and imagination.
Loving Places like the God who Died for Them
Years later, an aging Wayne finds himself surrounded and outnumbered. But rather than giving up, he grabs the limbs of an enormous, uprooted tree and does his best impression of Sampson toppling the temple columns.
But not before he bares his soul, shouting over the enemy’s taunts:
“I am only doing what I have done all my life, what is the only happiness... I am clinging to something. Let it fall, and there let it lie. Fools, you go about and see the kingdoms of the earth, and are wise and cosmopolitan, which is all that the devil can give you—all that he could offer to Christ, only to be spurned away... The joy I have is what the lover knows when a woman is everything. It is what I know when Notting Hill is everything.” (1)
It’s one last Braveheart moment, a howl of passion that’s not afraid of death.
And with it, Chesterton show that just like love for people, love for places must be unreasonable. It should come close to what Saint Paul wrote to the early churches about. Wayne may boast, but his love hangs, hoping, trusting, protecting, eschewing evil, right to the end.3
In Orthodoxy, Chesterton points out that those who love a place for its qualities love it superficially. But for those who love a place for no reason other than they love it, it’s their bride to cherish:
“Let us suppose we are confronted with a desperate thing – say Pimlico… The only way out of it seems to be for somebody to love Pimlico; to love it with a transcendental tie and without any earthly reason. If there arose a man who loved Pimlico, then Pimlico would rise into ivory towers and golden pinnacles… This, as a fact, is how cities did grow great. Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her.” (1)
It’s a recipe for flourishing, both physical and spiritual.
And we can trace it right back to the source:
“It wasn’t because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery,”4
Whether Notting Hill, Palestine, or even Sacramento, it’s the direction of the love itself—not the beloved’s qualities—that make the difference. As far as a Biblical approach to patriotism goes, God’s love for a wandering tribe and a tiny sliver of nondescript coastland is circular, a self-replenishing fountain.
God loved Israel because he loved Israel.
Christ died for the world because God so loved the world.
As we circle back to our present headaches, there’s enough here to challenge all of us.
With U-Haul prices topping the charts and a massive exodus out of collapsing places, those who moved to fresh horizons have a splendid change to love a new, imperfect place. And when the grass starts looking greener somewhere else, we can take stock of our hearts. What love and energy can we offer before starting to pack?
Those of us who haven’t moved just yet could use an Adam Wayne, a warrior who knows the stakes, knows he’ll be cancelled, but rises up regardless.
Cities that wield influence over a wide-flung nation and world need defending.
Enter Batman
I’m kidding.
But if by Batman, I mean supporting police officers, not kneeling before mobs or ideologies, and pushing for rules that, until a few years ago, were widely forced—then no. I’m not kidding at all.
As we saw in the late nineties turnaround of New York City, enforcing small rules, (not ignoring them) works wonders.
While we’re at it, can we throw out leaders who bleed compassion but won’t protect their citizens from crime, riots, and vagrancy? Whatever the rhetoric, there’s little love for places, or even people, down that dark alley—only cowardice.
With Head and Heart
None of this is arguing that places shouldn’t change.
Chesterton himself was a nonstop reformer, doing as much battle with selfishness, apathy, and entrenched, wealthy interests as he did with the secular evangelists of his time. It’s no minor detail that the two officials who would demolish Pump Street stand to profit.
But his head and his heart were in the right place—and like Adam Wayne’s, they led him straight to the fight, odds be damned.
If there’s an everyday patriotism that Chesterton might recognize, let it be silly, frivolous, and all the more loyal in 2021.
But as Saint Augustine advised, let’s get our loves in order. Rather than worshipping our own compassion, or the newest, loudest gods on the block, let’s reserve all fear and reverence for something brilliant—a child-loving warrior both fierce and gentle, even to the point of death.
Let’s love like the risen Christ, the son of a God who likes places.
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. The Napoleon of Notting Hill. Dover, 1991
Chesterton, Gilbert Keith. Orthodoxy. Doubleday, 2001
First Corinthians, 13:7
Deuteronomy, 7: 1-9
For the love of places, indeed. I lived in the Sun Valley, Idaho area for 14 years and worked in environmental conservation. Others lived there for love of skiing, fishing, hiking, and all that the outdoors provided. I lived there at first, well, just because. Because I felt dropped there: spat out like Jonah from the whale when I was attempting to move from LA to NYC. Eventually I realized it reminded me of my hometown in Michigan (which made no sense until I wrote my dissertation on the psychology of home). It was enough to simply love the place. I didn't need anything from it, nor did I need a qualifier for my affection.
Landscapes, neighborhoods, places... these are indeed as valuable as people. They shape us, teach us, house us, influence us in every way. People are defined by the places in which they live, the places from which they were born, the places in which they work and play.
You've done a wonderful job exploring this. I love the quotes from the book (a book which I am not familiar with but now am intrigued). To pull the idea even farther into the macro, environmental conservation is social justice. If we care about people at all, we MUST care for our places, for our earth. When we destroy these places, we destroy people.
Thank you for an interesting reflection!
Before there was Bruce, before there was Thomas, there was Adam Wayne!