![]() ![]() His failed marriage to Danielle is recounted as a sinner’s whispered confession. Which the world cannot be loved for what it is.” Review and his development of a consciousness of the expectation of death and dying – “without Scruton’s efforts to revitalize a moribund British conservatism, including his founding of the Salisbury His memoir eloquently details the personal implications of Edmund Burke’s salvific message Mots et les choses as “the old nominalist sleight of hand that was surely invented by the ![]() He describes Foucault’s socialist ‘Bible’, Les It was during the Paris uprising of May 1968 that Scrutonian conservatism was born, amidst the chaos Influence on him, upon matriculating to Cambridge, was matched by Wittgenstein, Kant and Wagner. Eliot as the “greatest poet of the twentieth century” whose ![]() Roger has the good taste to describe T.S. Of reality, though Dr Scruton had not yet inclined toward any religious feelings. Progress, technology, technique and consumption, has ravished culture and obliterated the ‘transcendent’ aspect Here heĬonjured up modernity, with the assistance of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West andĮrich Heller’s Disinherited Mind – and discovered that modernity, in its lust for Music in retreat from a world consumed by progress, and a father’s implicit rejection. Was no longer needed and where it was sufficient to just be,” dwelling among his books and classical Scruton took his comfort in the Oakshottian concept of ‘presentness’, where “justification The world for that impossible thing: an original path to conformity.” Of socialist England could ask “Why, Roger?” Dutifully he replies that he “was searching Like most of my generation, I was a rebel – but a meta-rebel, so to speak, in rebellionĪgainst rebellion, who devoted to shoring up ruins the same passionate conviction that my contemporariesĮmployed in creating them.” But upon describing this ‘anti-antinomian’ position, all “I grew to immaturity in the sixties,” Scruton writes, “when disorder was the order Is, Will his journey lead him to the ground of all reality? Tension of the ground of (his) existence – is launched in a quiet suburb of London. Dr Roger Scruton’s journey – or rather his exploration of the It was made so by people like Ivor.”Īnd so there you have it. ![]() For those born into bookless homes, but awoken by chance to literature, the public library wasĪ refuge, a place where you could come to terms with your isolation. Like Ivor made fortresses of books, where taste and scholarship survived and could be obtained free ofĬharge. In praise of librarians, even those who can barely tolerate greasy-fingered children, Scruton writes, “Librarians That is the judge of literature, but the other way around.” He discovered Robert Graves, Kafka and Kierkegaard, and is soon “persuaded that it is not life Mr Deas’ offerings in short order, including Dante, and proceeded to the local public library where More pedestrian minds and tastes were reading Conan Doyle, Poe and H. One of the twentieth century’s more interesting intellectual epiphanies. Was introduced to a librarian with the euphonious name George Ivor Deas, inherited his library, and began A precocious youth, at thirteen he found Pilgrim’s Progress, devoured it, andĭiscovered the author’s words to be “messages sent to the heart.” Two years later he May be the finest contemporary example of one man’s resistance to the “personal and socialīorn into a household bordering on what we might now refer to as dysfunctional, Scruton took solace In his memoir Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, British philosopher Roger Scruton givesĪ penetrating self-examination that is often remorseless and sometimes poignant, while presenting what Interest to me when a philosopher writes a book predicated on this theme. Of all reality” is not one often considered by post-modern philosophers, and so it is of great A possibility is a hint from God.”Īristotle’s argument that man “does not exist out of himself but out of the divine ground “It is very dangerous to go into eternity with possibilities which one has oneself preventedįrom becoming realities. SUBSCRIBE NOW Books Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life by Roger Scruton Robert Cheeks praises an intellectual memoir by Roger Scruton, Britain’s best-known conservative philosopher. ![]()
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