I used generally to have tea with in his [Russell's] rooms in Trinity when I went to Cambridge. A more brilliant intellect I never met, but he was much more approachable than McTaggart had been at first; and he had a peculiar charm of his own. His writings were most pessimistic, but he himself always appeared in the best of spirits—a feature which I had also noticed in pessimists on frontier expeditions. Apparently the way really to enjoy oneself is to be full of dark forebodings and expect the worst; then if the worst actually happens it is only what one had expected, and if anything less than the worst occurs one can be in uproarious good-humour.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "I used generally to have tea with in his [Russell's] rooms in Trinity when I went to Cambridge. A more brilliant intellect I never met, but he was much more approachable than McTaggart had been at first; and he had a peculiar charm of his own. His writings were most pessimistic, but he himself always appeared in the best of spirits—a feature which I had also noticed in pessimists on frontier expeditions. Apparently the way really to enjoy oneself is to be full of dark forebodings and expect the worst; then if the worst actually happens it is only what one had expected, and if anything less than the worst occurs one can be in uproarious good-humour." in the context of "Francis Younghusband, The Light of Experience: A Review of Some Men and Events of My Time (1927), p. 219" to mean that wisdom is timeless.