Chesterton again: “It is currently said that hope goes with youth, and lends to youth its wings of a butterfly; but I fancy that hope is the last gift given to man, and the only gift not given to youth. Youth is pre-eminently the period in which a man can be lyric, fanatical, poetic; but youth is also the period in which a man can be hopeless. The end of every episode is the end of the world. But the power of hoping through everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great inspiration comes to the middle-aged; God has kept that good wine until now.”

That’s plenty, but he goes on: “It is from the backs of the elderly gentleman that the wings of the butterfly should burst. There is nothing that so much mystifies the young as the consistent frivolity of the old.”

And he didn’t even have teenage kids.