Fore-bear

 
Reading Chesterton's Orthodoxy because I'm advising a student who's studying Chesterton, I came upon this:

"But nearly all people I have ever met in this western society in which I live would agree to the general proposition that we need this life of practical romance: the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure."

Which is what my story Novelty asserts, except for describing the combination as a pull of contraries, only partly reconciled in the end. What's odd -- or maybe not at all odd -- is that my story turns on a man trying to make something strange out of his secure and comfortable childhood Catholicism; Chesterton was trying to win through to a similar strange/secure kind of Christianity on his way to becoming a Catholic (for him an ideally strange/secure kind of Christianity.)