Confucius, "and in the
running find strength and reward.") After that we tried talking about
Magnus, and came to some hopeful conclusions. Magnus is all right. As
for Lawrence and Grey, if there is anything righter than all right,
they are that. . . .

There is an expression in Meredith's book which struck me immensely:
"the largeness of the evening earth." The sensation that the Cosmos
has all its windows open is very characteristic of evening, just as
it is at this moment. I feel very good. Everything out of the window
looks very, very flat and yellow: I do not know how else to describe
it.

It is like the benediction at the end of the service.

CHAPTER V

The Notebook

I AM WRITING THIS chapter at a table facing Notre Dame de Paris in
front of a cafe filled with arguing French workmen--in the presence
of God and of Man; and I feel as if I understood the one hatred of
G.K.'s life: his loathing of pessimism. "Is a man proud of losing his
hearing, eyesight or sense of smell? What shall we say of him who
prides himself on beginning as an intellectual cripple and ending as
an intellectual corpse?"*

[* From _The Notebook_.]

SOME PROPHECIES

Woe unto them that keep a God like a silk hat, that believe not in
God, but in a God.

Woe unto them that are pompous for they will sooner or later be
ridiculous.

Woe unto them that are tired of everything, for everything will
certainly be tired of them.

Woe unto them that cast out everything, for out of everything they
will be cast out.

Woe unto them that cast out anything, for out of that thing they
will be cast out.

Woe unto the flippant, for they shall receive flippancy.

Woe unto them that are scornful for they shall receive scorn.

Woe unto him that considereth his hair foolishly, for his hair will
be made the type of him.

Woe unto him that is smart, for men will hold him smart always,
even when he is serious.*

[* Ibid.]

A pessimist is a man who has never lived, never suffered: "Show me a
person who has plenty of worries and troubles and I will show you a
person who, whatever he is, is not a pessimist."

This idea G.K. developed later in the _Dickens_, dealing with the
alleged over-optimism of Dickens--Dickens who if he had learnt to
whitewash the universe had learnt it in a blacking factory, Dickens
who had learnt through hardship and suffering to accep