t did
a week mean for most of them? Seven dull days. What did it really
mean? "What has really happened during the last seven days and
nights? Seven times we have been dissolved into darkness as we shall
be dissolved into dust; our very selves, so far as we know, have been
wiped out of the world of living things; and seven times we have been
raised alive like Lazarus, and found all our limbs and senses
unaltered, with the coming of the day."

Seven days of human life, the meaning of the phrase, "the spice of
life," both brought the same recurring motif that "a great many
people are at this moment paying rather too much attention to the
spice of life, and rather too little attention to life." Not in any
"distraction from life is the secret we are all seeking, the secret
of enjoying life. I am perfectly certain that all our world will end
in despair unless there is some way of making the mind itself, the
ordinary thoughts we have at ordinary times, more healthy and more
happy than they seem to be just now, to judge by most modern novels
and poems. . . ." A week had never been for Chesterton just seven
days hard, although he had worked hard enough. He had enjoyed the
spice of life, he had liked Beer and Skittles and the distractions of
life and its high points of achievement.

But it is much more important to remember that I have been
intensely and imaginatively happy in the queerest because the
quietest places. I have been filled with life from within in a cold
waiting-room, in a deserted railway junction. I have been completely
alive sitting on an iron seat under an ugly lamp-post at a third rate
watering place. In short, I have experienced the mere excitement of
existence in places that would commonly be called as dull as
ditchwater. And, by the way, is ditchwater dull? Naturalists with
microscopes have told me that it teems with quiet fun.

The younger generation were despairing of life in the face of life's
manifold gifts. Chesterton as a youth had revolted against the
pessimism of his elders, now he revolted as an old man against a
young generation corroded by a yet more poisonous pessimism. "The
Hollow Men" T. S. Eliot had called a poem and in it came the lines

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

Forgive me if I say in my old world fashion, that I'm damned if I
ever felt like