If you’re feeling depressed about the culture around you, Dr. Elliott has a prescription for you: one full dose of Whit Stillman’s 2011 film, Damsels in Distress, followed by tap dancing. I am perfectly serious. This charming story unfolds with a group of quirky college girls on the campus of Seven Oaks, a fictitious Ivy [...]
Some observations: 1. The singular (classic) Greek contribution to liberty is freedom of the mind. That means, more or less, the freedom of Socrates. 2. Well, there’s also the freedom of the citizen. The freedom to participate in ruling and so be more than a merely material or economic or tribal or familial being. 3. [...]
The story of the Indian Wars for the American West in Peter Cozzens’s “The Earth Is Weeping” contains the tragic patterns of all human history. This history, like all real history, lives once we awaken memory and see the real contours of what lies before us. One of the compensations for long hours in the [...]
Hector Berlioz brightened the world with his art. He marched to the beat of his own drum—sometimes literally. My binge on Berlioz has made me warm to the composer. And I am readier, I think, to accept him on his own terms. Many years ago, a reader introduced himself to me outside the Metropolitan Opera [...]
T.S. Eliot’s “Ash-Wednesday” helps us to consider our earthly transience, just as Ash Wednesday reminds us of this same fact that our time on earth is passing. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita . . . There is something telling about man’s tendency to view his life as a journey, for journeys convey the [...]
Antonio Lucio Vivaldi’s music is timeless. Performed within the orchestral world, period films, and popular culture today, his works and melodies are recognizable, even to a movie crowd. Yet his work was often discredited in his lifetime because he was prolific. Composers and critics alike believed that Vivaldi’s sheer quantity of production outweighed his quality. Vivaldi and [...]
American wars produce songs of hope, encouragement, nostalgia, longing, sadness, and humor. Only one war produced a stirring song of triumphalist heresy. The war that made us independent gave us “Yankee Doodle,” a frivolous tune that threw back in the face of the Brits a term they had used to belittle us. The most popular [...]
Through unnamed sources involved in the proceedings, these notes were smuggled out of the Celestial Courtroom, where the ongoing evaluation of the Nations takes place in Committee Hearings in preparation for the Final Judgment. St. Peter was the presiding Chairman, Senator Screwtape the first witness. [Classified Top Secret, Embargo on Distribution] St. Peter: We are [...]
If anything saves our constitutional republic at this stage it will be Americans’ sheer unruliness, our unwillingness to sit still and be told what to do by people convinced that their scores on entrance exams (or, perhaps, on the squash court) entitle them to organize our lives for us. Law & Leviathan: Redeeming the Administrative [...]
Wherever we are—in restaurants or in the Metro or wherever—we are overhearing music coming at us from all angles, and we are learning how to ignore it. We live in a society where, if we do not learn to ignore it, we cannot also learn to listen to it. This puts an enormous strain on [...]
How much folly could have been avoided if our contemporary leaders truly understood the deeper patrimony of ordered liberty? To maintain ordered liberty, our leaders need to gird up and learn to wield the five swords of imagination, because all must be swung simultaneously with trained virtuosity. Kudos to Gleaves Whitney for his insightful and [...]
Willmoore Kendall contended that the conventional interpretation of John Locke, depicting him as an exponent of individualism and natural rights which transcended majority sentiments, was in error. By any reasonable standard of measurement, Willmoore Kendall would have to be included in a list of the most important political scientists of the post-World War II era. [...]
So, is it the End? Possibly. Christians have been worried about the End since the days that Christ walked the earth. Could it happen three minutes after you have read this? Maybe. Could it happen three thousand years after you read this? Just as likely. Toward the end of the twentieth century, closing two thousand [...]
To the various branches of the Army the General takes this last and solemn opportunity of professing his inviolable attachment and friendship. He wishes to bid a final adieu to the Armies he has so long had the honor to Command, he can only again offer in their behalf his recommendations to their grateful country, [...]