The Truth of the Last Tree
Looking Up from the Back of the World
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Once a year, I open these doors a little wider. This is the only 50% discount I run all year. I’ve asked management about bringing it back at Christmas. Apparently, the elving schedule is non-negotiable. Paid subscribers receive full access to The Great Sabotage (monthly cultural field reports), commenting and full archive, behind-the-scenes research and commentary, private audio reflections, and occasional video dispatches. So if you’ve been circling the paid tier, this is your moment to step inside.
It doesn’t matter when you start your year. It just matters that you start.
What do I mean?
I spent the last six weeks off-grid. It wasn’t intentional. I wrote, produced, and distributed one of my favourite projects to date: O Night Divine. It was beautiful—and I mean that for me. It was such a rich project, and the response from readers exceeded my expectations. You can go over here to read/listen about how I did it.
Well, the long and short of it? I wrote a 1,000-word essay every day for 26 days. Sometimes posting at 4:30 a.m. I did all this while keeping my normal work/client load. Can you guess what happened to me after New Year’s? You got it.
Sick. Really sick. So sick that I lost my voice for nearly 10 days. That’s never happened to me.
I walk, ruck, or work out regularly. Nope. I could hardly walk around my neighborhood.
I didn’t feel myself till the first week in February. I surfaced on Instagram on January 31. Why? Because a beautiful thing happened. It snowed 10 inches in Waxhaw, North Carolina. So I had to walk our trail in the snow. After that. Sleep.
“I tell you this, that you will have found out the truth of the last tree and the top-most cloud before the truth about me. You will understand the sea, and I shall be still a riddle; you shall know what the stars are, and not know what I am.”
—G.K. Chesterton, The Man Who Was Thursday, the character Sunday speaking to the “dynamiters.”
And then, another beautiful thing happened. I started cooking. That’s what you do when you have no strength. You roast tomatoes, peppers, garlic, and onions, then make tomato-basil soup, and impress yourself (and your wife). Now I can’t stop making soups, steaks, and purees. I’m cooking so much that my wife bought me the Ninja food chopper and a new cast-iron skillet for my birthday. I’m so excited about it that I created a Notes folder: Tim’s Storm King Recipes. Who is the Storm King?
I am. 🌊
{And yes, I will be posting some recipes on this Substack. Are you ready for that? 🍲}
Something happens when you’re sick. You stop. You stop everything. And you start listening. You start looking. And, if you’ve followed me for any amount of time, you know where I look when I listen. Up.
A few years ago, I purchased massive stargazing binoculars so my daughters and I could get just a bit closer to the Pleiades. How far can we see into the stars?
If you were part of our Advent series, O Night Divine, you heard me opine about UY Scuti and the cosmic frame of our universe. Even on ordinary nights, stepping outside and lifting your gaze changes something in you.
Your perspective widens. The world slows down. And something mysterious seeps into you.
During my recovery, I reread The Man Who Was Thursday. I was on my way to the grocery store, and I listened to the final two chapters and wept. In these chapters, Chesterton transitions from a full-blown spy-mystery-thriller to a metaphysical mind-bender. It’s riveting.
At one point in the final chapter, the main protagonist, Gabrielle Syme, realizes that, in all the chaos of the adventure he’s enduring, he’s been seeing the world all wrong. He experiences an epiphany of perspective.
He says,
“Listen to me,” cried Syme with extraordinary emphasis. “Shall I tell you the secret of the whole world? It is that we have only known the back of the world. We see everything from behind, and it looks brutal. That is not a tree, but the back of a tree. That is not a cloud, but the back of a cloud.
Cannot you see that everything is stooping and hiding a face? If we could only get round in front—”
This one passage in the novel sums up two of Chesterton’s most beloved books: Orthodoxy and The Man Who Was Thursday.
I could not stop thinking about Syme’s line: “We have only known the back of the world.” The trees, the clouds, the ocean—it can all look brutal, feel harsh and unforgiving. The whole world can look bruised.
What Syme says implicitly is that there’s another side to the world. The side of the dawn, where the light makes everything look new and reborn every day. If we turn our gaze, shift our perspective, that same brutal world looks radiant.
For months, I’ve felt like I’ve been living in the back of the world. Striving, pushing, pulling, producing. Have you ever felt like that? That in the midst of doing the very thing you know is good and true to you, can also be brutal and harsh? But then, sickness forced me to stop. To cook. To listen. And, look up. And change my perspective. To seek and to know the front of the world.
And so, here I am. Beginning again. And you can, too. Ours is not a back of the world reality. It’s one of light and dazzling delights.
Notes on The Man Who Was Thursday
This has to be Chesterton’s strangest (in the best way) and most prophetic novel. Every time I return to it, I’m struck by how joy, sanity, and courage are framed as acts of rebellion. It’s a book about infiltration. It’s about discovering that the fight for God’s order often looks like chaos from the outside. This novel is winter reading, if ever there was such a thing.
And yes, I have three versions. I have several versions of many books by Chesterton, Lewis, and MacDonald. What can I say? It’s a thing.
Some fun facts.
The Man Who Was Thursday was published in 1908, the same year as his book Orthodoxy. The center version is the 1972 Penguin Edition. Rare first editions (not pictured) are crimson covered wth just the title and author on the front; the spine’s “G.K Chesterton” reveals it is a true 1st because the “K” did not receive a full stop on the first print run. You can find first editions for around $600+. It’s perpetually on my birthday list.
The Great Sabotage
Metaphysical Counterintelligence — Third Thursdays
In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing about the back of the world from the front of the world, hope, culture, the sky, and why it matters, our longing to see the front of things, and yes, occasionally, what the Storm King is cooking. Plus a new, monthly culture series (Hint: The Great Sabotage).
Sometimes the most important shift isn’t forward. It’s turning the world just so, until the light catches it and shows the whole world ablaze … with wonder.
I’m glad to be back.
Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
What’s the first dispatch of The Great Sabotage series? Well, I thought we’d start with something light.
Aliens.
Or more precisely, why so many people are suddenly looking up again.
See you next Thursday.
Cheers,
🛸 Tim 👽
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