Men in Dark Times

Only slowly did it dawn upon me that he did not want to belong among “the happy few, who grow fewer and unhappier day by day,” for the simple reason that he was a democrat at heart with “a scientific education and a radical youth,” who was “old-fashioned enough to believe, like Goethe, in Progress.”

(Chesterton it seems was another one, and I suspect that much of his great insight into, not so much the philosophy, but the person of St. Thomas sprang from the sheer sympathy of one very awkward and very fat man with another.)

As he grew older, it was only natural that the number of dead friends should increase; and although I never saw him violently stricken with grief, I was aware of the almost calculated carefulness with which he kept mentioning their names as though he were afraid that through some fault of his they would slip away altogether from the company of the living.