Everything worth conserving is menaced in our generation. Mere unthinking negative opposition to the current of events, clutching in despair at what we still retain, will not suffice in this age. A conservatism of instinct must be reinforced by a conservatism of thought and imagination. A friend of mine, whom we shall call Miss Worth, fell [...]
At a certain stage and for no apparent reason, self-criticism among those of us in the West gave way to repudiation. Instead of subjecting our inheritance to a critical evaluation, seeking what is good in it and trying to understand and endorse the ties that binds us to it, a great many of those appointed [...]
The problem for modern music arose from the way in which ideas came to displace feelings as the source of musical creation. Conscious repetition of learned effects does not amount to real musical content. Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, by Robert R. Reilly (Ignatius Press, 2016) Robert R. [...]
The dual definition of “modern”—something that is current and something that is done in a certain manner—touches on a problem that is at the heart of the literary and artistic movement of the early twentieth century known as “Modernism”: Is Modernism something that was meant to represent the “just now” or is it something that [...]
Conservatism is confronted by the existential question of its own philosophy: what is left to conserve? Indeed, is there anything worth conserving? I think there are positive answers to this—the nation being the foremost—but that is a concern for another time. Here, I want to make the point that conservatism, beyond the substantive vision of [...]
Memorization gives honor to the past, both with our time, which is required for memorization, and with our attention, our willingness to make the past part of ourselves. It seeks the voices of truth, goodness, or beauty, whenever they first lived, and listens. At the risk of sounding trite, memorization is the imaginative, conservative discipline [...]
Central to classical poetry is the concept of metaphor—metaphor not simply as a rhetorical device, but metaphor as central to the poem itself. Such use of metaphor is absent from modernist poetry. In a worldview that denies absolute truth outright or at least its knowability, nothing exists for metaphor to reveal. In my last essay, [...]
The past is, indeed, a place in which to take refuge when it is necessary to pull back, to contemplate life, and to mull things over. The present is the phase for brisk deliberation, decision, and action; for being in that sleepwalking state in which we do, more or less surefootedly, the one thing needful [...]
Baseball is a thinking man’s sport—it requires a ton of focus on stats in order to get the most fun out of it. Because of this, and so much history and tradition involved, conservatives are naturally drawn to the game. Sometimes you can be in the right place at the right time. For me, it [...]
As a sustained artistic school, modernism cannot endure. But classical art is eternal because the ideas it expresses are eternal. A resurrection of classical form does not represent a return to the past, real or imagined, but instead a return to sanity, a reorientation of the artistic eye back to its natural, fully human purpose [...]
Long after Barrett Wendell’s death, an elderly George Santayana remembered his former Harvard colleague fondly. “We were on the same side of the barricade.” Both he and Wendell loved the College with all its quirky traditions and sought to protect it from the academic innovations of President Charles Eliot. “We both desired to screen those [...]
Some American places have excellent local cuisines. However, the cultures that sustain them are dying, as they are in Italy with its pasta cuisine. We are losing our connection with the roots of cuisine because our culture is shattered, fragmented, and undermined by globalization. Paging through the food section of The Wall Street Journal, I [...]
Citizens of the twenty-first century, learn from us to respect and honor your traditions. You seem so fascinated with novel, untried ideas that you often overlook the wisdom of the past. If we forget that legacy, we cease to be who we are. Author’s Introduction: Imagine if Homer, Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, and the other great [...]
T.S. Eliot reaches into the unsaid, perhaps even into the ultimately unsayable, in a way that makes new possibilities present for those of his own time. Eliot comes out of the great tradition, the long conversation of the West, which is now your own earned inheritance as well. What will you do with it? Early [...]