Holy dying …

… Sir Roger Scruton: Last days of a giant | Mark Dooley | The Critic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

During our last weekend together, I watched in silent grief as he began to rise ‘above the wind of contingency that blows through the natural world’.  In a way, he had already passed through the window of our empirical world to that ‘other sphere’ about which he had so often wrote so beautifully and persuasively.  He was dying, yet he was also rising to assume the transcendental standpoint which, he believed, was the answer and the solution to every form of pseudoscience.  Whether it was aiding dissidents in Communist Czechoslovakia or abandoning the academy for a life of farming and writing, Scruton had always given concrete expression to his ideals.  In his own life, he had always given witness to what he believed in and resolutely fought for.  And now, as he approached the end, he was showing us how to transcend suffering by finding meaning in it. ‘I not only learned things about the world, but I absorbed them to the point where they became part of who I am,’ he said.  One of those things was the deep mystery at the heart of each person – the fact that we are in the world but not of it.