[Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton]@TWC D-Link bookOrthodoxy CHAPTER V 21/53
I must pause to anticipate an obvious criticism.
It will be said that a rational person accepts the world as mixed of good and evil with a decent satisfaction and a decent endurance.
But this is exactly the attitude which I maintain to be defective.
It is, I know, very common in this age; it was perfectly put in those quiet lines of Matthew Arnold which are more piercingly blasphemous than the shrieks of Schopenhauer-- "Enough we live:--and if a life, With large results so little rife, Though bearable, seem hardly worth This pomp of worlds, this pain of birth." I know this feeling fills our epoch, and I think it freezes our epoch. For our Titanic purposes of faith and revolution, what we need is not the cold acceptance of the world as a compromise, but some way in which we can heartily hate and heartily love it.
We do not want joy and anger to neutralise each other and produce a surly contentment; we want a fiercer delight and a fiercer discontent.
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