One Foot in Fairyland

G.K. Chesterton, the patron saint of our blog, in his most popular work, Orthodoxy (emphasis mine):

The ordinary man has always been sane because the ordinary man has always been a mystic.  He has permitted the twilight.  He has always had one foot on earth and the other in fairyland.  He has always left himself free to doubt his gods, but unlike the agnostic of today, free also to believe in them.  He's always cared more for truths than for consistency.  If he saw two truths that seemed to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with them. . .  Thus he has always believed that there was such a thing as fate but such a thing as free will also.

This says something heart-achingly profound about fairy tales, and why they matter.