It is commonly said that hope goes with youth and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly: but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is a period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the End of the World. But the real power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, this great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept this good wine until now. It is from the backs of the elderly gentlemen that the wings of the butterfly should burst. There is nothing that so much mystifies the young as the constant frivolity of the old. The have discovered their indestructibility. They are in their second and clearer childhood, and there is meaning in the merriment in their eyes. They have seen the end of the End of the World.
G K Chesterton
JJN CC 2004
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