Video: 3 minutes

Life becomes magical when beliefs are let go, mistakes are embraced, and plans are allowed to change. Life is a mystery, a struggle, a journey and a miracle that I have had the pleasure of experiencing in this form already for half a century. That is by far the best birthday present anyone can wish for! Now the birthday boy will treat and I do this by means of a double present.

The first is a digital version of G.K. Chesterton’s The Defendant. Having been written very early in the 20th century, this gathering of essays now belongs to the public domain, and it’s not for nothing that Chesterton emerged earlier in the Magical section of this website. Because if there is one author who’s ability to transmit his genuine sense of wonder and unique feel for paradox via stories, it’s Chesterton.

In his Defendant series he’s making cases why we should defend illusive topics like Rash Vows, Skeletons, Nonsense, Useful Information, Farce, or Baby Worship. In his Defence of Ugly Things for instance, he argues that the worst offenders against valuing the variety of life were the Greeks – much more than the Jews, as he states in the following paragraph:

“The tyrants and deceivers of mankind in this matter have been the Greeks. All their splendid work for civilization ought not to have wholly blinded us to the fact of their great and terrible sin against the variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did not starve their instinct for contrasts and combinations; their prophets gave two wings to the ox and any number of eyes to the cherubim with all the riotous ingenuity of Lewis Carroll. But the Greeks carried their police regulation into elfland; they vetoed not the actual adulteries of the earth but the wild weddings of ideas, and forbade the banns of thought.”

Chesterton’s ‘The Defendant’ can be downloaded below as EPub or PDF files, and I wish you jolly reading with these marvellous stories.

Secondly the Dutch reading audience was treated to my Dutch translation of Stephen Mitchell’s English version of the Tao Te Ching. What was initially a personal study project, has transformed into a digital version which I’m happy to offer any of you who read Dutch via the button below. Since I am celebrating my 50th birthday in China, it is only fitting to share this special work with you.

Finally, I share a video below in which a short song introduces a Tai Chi video that is a nice reflection of my training so far.