“I know it is all very strange. From the height of eight hundred years ago, or of eight hundred years hence, our age must look incredibly odd. We call the twelfth century ascetic. We call our own time hedonist, full of praise and pleasure. But in the ascetic age the love of life was evident and enormous, so that it had to be restrained. In an hedonist age pleasure has always sunk so low, so that it has to be encouraged. How high the sea human happiness rose in the Middle Ages, we now only know by the colossal walls they built to keep it in bounds. How human happiness sank in the twentieth century our children will only know by extraordinary modern books which tell that it is a duty to be cheerful and that life not so bad after all.”
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton
