His
sense of hopelessness was very genuine. First of all, this starless outlook is
common in the calamities of boyhood. The bitterness of boyish distresses does
not lie in the fact that they are large; it lies in the fact that we do not
know that they are small. About any early disaster there is a dreadful
finality; a lost child can suffer like a lost soul.
It is currently 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 preeminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical,
poetic; but youth is the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of
every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through
everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great
inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that 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
consistent frivolity of the old. They have discovered their indestructibility.
They are in their second and clearer childhood, and there is a meaning in the
merriment of their eyes. They have seen the end of the End of the World.
GKCh, The boyhood of Dickens.
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