Explore "Memory Hold-The-Door" by John Buchan on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
These chapters are meant as a record of how the surface of life has appeared to one pilgrim at different stages. They do not contain a confession of faith, in religion, philosophy, or the business of government. I admit an undercurrent of optimism, which, it has been said, is in good times a luxury but in bad times a necessity. With me such cheerfulness, as I prefer to call it, is not a creed to adopt or reject, but a habit of mind, a temperamental bias, a pre-condition of perception and thought. And it in turn derives from the kind of youth I had. For youth to continue, so that it illumines middle life and old age and pleasantly binds the years together, it must have been spacious, with wide horizons and a tonic air; happy, too, in spite of all the heart-breaks of adolescence. For what it can give to the later phases of life are zest and freedom, and such gifts are impossible if it was itself bound and frustrate.
In my lifetime I seem to note a change which is a graver thing than our other discontents, which, indeed, is in a large measure the cause of them. The outlook of youth has been narrowed, doors have been sealed, channels have silted up, there is less choice of routes at the cross-roads.