Short story: A Crazy Tale by G.K. Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton is a writer who I like a lot. I don't have quite as much fondness for him as I do for some other writers we could name, but I really enjoy a lot of his work and I think he was a pretty cool guy.

'A Crazy Tale' is a short story in which a young man, seemingly at random, begins telling a story that begins with him walking in a green void (before which he has no memories) and continues through a patchwork landscape of Biblical references, ideas and places from English folklore going back to the pre-Christian period, shout-outs to Lewis Carroll and Mother Goose, and vivid descriptions of pure shape and colour that in retrospect seem to bear a resemblance to how some autistic children view the world.


'With the giant was a woman. When I saw her something stirred within me lie the memory of a previous existence....Instead of killing me, the giant and giantess fed me and tended me like servants. I began to undrestand that in that lost epic of adventures which led up to the greatest event of my life, I must have done some great service for these good people....
'A new and dreadful fancy had me by the throat. The woman was smaller than before. The house was smaller: the ceiling was nearer. Heaven and earth, even to the remotest star, were closing in to crush me. The next moment I had realised the truth, fled from the house, and plunged into the thickets like a thing posssessed....I was growing larger and larger whether I would or no. I rolled in the gravel, revolving wild guesses as to whether I should grow to fill the sky, a giant with my head in heaven, bewildered among the golden plumage of Cherubim. This, as a matter of fact, I never did....
'Within a few feet of me was kneeling one of my own size, a little girl with big blue eyes and hair black as crows. The landscape behind her was the same in every hedge and tree that I had left; yet I felt sure I had come into a new world....
''They say you are the mad boy,' she said, 'who stares at everything. But I think I like them mad.''

And so on, until the last lines, spoken by the story's narrator and not by the young man telling the crazy tale in question:

'It occurred to me that the man was mad. I am almost ashamed to admit with what suddenness it came. For so long as I was in his presence, I had believed him and his whole attitude to be sane, normal, complete, and that it was the rest, the whole human race, that were half-witted, since the making of the word.'

So yeah. READ IT.