My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful.
My husband’s remarks are sounding more and more like those of Jack Woolley in The Archers, but this week one of his questions proved quite useful. I’d been reading the very good new biography of the young G.K. Chesterton by William Oddie. My husband, having found my book more interesting than his, looked up from it and said: ‘What does he mean by pessimism?’
Certainly, a revolt against pessimism was the central event of Chesterton’s life. In 1894, when he was 20, he went through a crisis at the Slade school of art. He saw, among the decadents of the day and in writers such as Hardy and Henley, a ‘pessimism’ leading to the deepest abyss of all: the denial that anything had any purpose, indeed that anything existed at all.
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