Bill Buckley, R.I.P.

How surprising, even given his age. He survived his wife by less than a year (she died in April of '07). He was a huge influence; I discovered National Review at our college library and was forever smitten. I also remember reading his Blackford Oakes novel Saving the Queen with delicious pleasure such that that pleasant time of my life and that book are inextricably linked.

In Atlantic High, William F. Buckley imagines Purgatory & Heaven, where "the cooler" is the time of purgation:

To be sure, it is axiomatic to this fantasy that I have been judged and, after sitting it out in the cooler for a few millennia, admitted. What then happens, surely, is that the people there, while not losing their flavor, manage somehow to lose that about them which once made them -- human. They are transfigured, by the central energy; and so you find sweetness that does not cloy, argument that does not vex, humor that does not lacerate, work that does not tire. The oxymoronization of life, the use of which word may jeopardize my chances of making it to Heaven.

...But it is part of the rules that you cannot succeed in describing that fantasy: For it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love Him. I understand this to mean that a No Trespassing sign has gone up for the fantasist, and I for one intend to observe it.

From his collected speeches, Let Us Talk Of Many Things:

In respect of apologetics we are better off in the twentieth century than we were in the first. St. Peter would have had a more difficult time engaging a sophist than, say, John Courtney Murray would have today, replying to Bishop Pike. Even so, notwithstanding our intellectual resources, notwithstanding our moral and spiritual resources, we [Catholics] are on the defensive. And it is the excruciating irony that the more highly educated we are, the more keenly we tend to feel the pangs of exclusion from the dominant intellectual hustle and bustle of the age. Our faith is more severely buffeted, now that we move easily in the world of knowledge, than it was when we were illiterate.

One obvious cause is the interminable war between the self-justifying flesh and the forlorn spirit, a war in which all baptized human beings are eternally conscript as double agents. Another cause is the lure of rationalism: If we can perfectly understand how to split the atom, why can't we know how to fuse the Trinity? Surely another cause is the friction between fundamentalist and transcendent understandings of scripture....The appeal of literalism has done much to shake the faith of the literate.

From Nearer My God:

...the Christian needs to begin his adjudications by acknowledging an infinity of gratitude for being alive and a candidate for perpetual life. Ivan Denisovich in the cold horror of the Arctic labor camp felt a rush of gratitude on that day when fate conspired to give him an extra ounce of bread. People I saw on a visit to Lourdes were happy, and, in their perspective, grateful. Christianity asks that we cultivate the love of God.

An old Jonah Goldberg column on Buckley here. The Hoover Institute has old Firing Lines here.

The world feels a bit poorer today, but is far better for his having been in it.