Russell Kirk Like an emerald dropped by Sinbad’s roc into the Valley of the Serpents, Camp James Wilkinson, amidst the sand, sparkled from the red sun that was setting in Nevada across the salt flats. The serpents were literal enough, since rattlesnakes crushed by wheels of military trucks lay dead every day across [...]
All great systems, ethical or political, attain their ascendancy over the minds of men by virtue of their appeal to the imagination; and when they cease to touch the chords of wonder and mystery and hope, their power is lost, and men look elsewhere for some set of principles by which they may be guided. [...]
Some day I shall write a book with the title The Age of Eliot (ed., published as Eliot and His Age). The span of Mr. T. S. Eliot’s life, extending from the ascendancy of President Cleveland and Lord Salisbury to our present troubled hour, has been characterized by as much material change as any age in the whole [...]
T.S. Eliot By “the Permanent Things” [T. S. Eliot] meant those elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. They work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the [...]
Walk beside the Liffey in Dublin, a trifle west of the dome of the Four Courts, and you come to Number 12, Arran Quay. This is a brick building of three stories, which began as a gentleman’s residence, some time since became a shop, and now is a governmental office of the meaner sort—symbolic of [...]
Russell Kirk In the paragraphs below, from A Program for Conservatives, Dr. Russell Kirk addresses conservatives with words which remind us of our pilgrim status in this world of tears. We are not called to material success. We are called to obedience. We are called to love. The True, the Good, and the Beautiful will find their true [...]
Getting up in recent months an anthology of conservative writing, The Portable Conservative Reader, I had reason to reread much of Burke. More than ever before, I was impressed with how relevant Burke’s thoughts - and, indeed, Burke’s actions - remain to our present discontents. (It is with some reluctance I employ that word “relevant,” [...]
I'd say a conservative is a person who prefers the devil he knows to the devil he doesn't. He knows there are always ills and devils in the world, and he would rather get along with present imperfections than dash into some ruinous and impossible scheme of perfectibility. Editor's Note: This interview, conducted in the [...]
Cant and equivocation dismissed, it seems to me that there are three great bodies of principle and conviction that tie together what is called modern civilization. The first of these is the Christian faith: the theological and moral doctrines which inform us, either side of the Atlantic, of the nature of God and man, the [...]
This evening, ladies and gentlemen, I conclude my lecture series with some desultory remarks on the possibility of redemption from error—and, in particular, whether our rising generation in these United States may find it possible to “redeem the time, redeem the dream”—to borrow T.S. Eliot’s line First, a few words about this concept “generation.” To [...]
Russell Kirk What is this “moral imagination”? The phrase is Edmund Burke’s, and it occurs in his Reflections on the Revolution in France. Burke describes the destruction of civilizing manners by the revolutionaries: In the franchise bookshops the shelves are crowded with the prickly pears and the Dead Sea fruit of literary decadence. [...]
“Nobody can make a tradition,” Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote; “it takes a century to make it.” There are American traditions, because there have been three centuries of American history; yet this is a brief period of time, when one remembers that some of the traditions of Europe and Asia and Africa have their roots in a [...]
By the conservatism of desolation, I mean the forlorn endeavor of certain persons of conservative instincts to convince themselves that they are “individualists”—that is, devotees of spiritual and social isolation. The dreary secular dogma of individualism is the creation of Godwin, Hodgskin, and Herbert Spencer, and it progresses from anarchy back to anarchy again. Any [...]
Russell Kirk All history, and especially modern history, is in some sense the account of the decline of community and the ruin consequent upon that loss. In this process, the rise of the modern State has been by far the most powerful influence. ‘The single most decisive influence upon Western social organization has [...]