Chesterton's Paradoxes

You can really get a sense of how he makes paradox work and the delight of the shock and ending. An essay like The 12th Men, or What I Found in My Pocket, are all perfect finger-bikes for the essays. One of my favorite is from the thrilling romance of Orthodoxy, the end of chapter 5. People have fallen into a foolish habit of speaking of orthodoxy as sometimes heavy, humdrum, and safe. There never was anything so perilous or so exciting as orthodoxy. To be sane is more dramatic than to be mad.