His last chance to “chat about the future.” (Photo: Pete Helme)
My post on Sir Roger Scruton‘s death on January 12 tapped into an unexpected amount of interest. I didn’t know the writer and philosopher’s work before his death, so it’s odd I find myself writing the third post in less than two months, but here we are. (The other earlier post was here.)
The new occasion: over at The Critic, his Irish biographer Mark Dooley recounts his last visits with his friend and subject. The piece might serve as an introduction to those who are as new to his thought as I am.
He begins:
“It was just before Christmas last year when I travelled to Sunday Hill Farm in Wiltshire, the fabled home of my dear friend Sir Roger Scruton. I was there to chat about his health and some future collaborations that we had planned. When he was diagnosed with cancer at the end of last summer, he had written asking me to visit so that we could, as he put it, ‘chat about the future’.
As I entered the farmhouse – what he liked to call ‘Scrutopia’ – Roger sat alone in the evening gloom tapping away on his laptop. Even in his weakened state, he felt compelled to write. Back in 2015, when we recorded the discussions for my book Conversations with Roger Scruton, he told me that, ‘I wrote from the moment I had the calling to be a writer, which I got when I was sixteen. I didn’t know how to do it, but I wrote every day and I always have done’. This was a truth I discovered first-hand whenever I visited him at home, or when he came to Ireland, or even when we were at conferences elsewhere. The first thing he did each morning was go to his desk and write. For him, it was a daily vocation that simply had to answered. That day was no different. ‘What are you writing?’ I asked. ‘The Scrutopia newsletter,’ he replied without taking his eyes off the screen. He then proceeded to tell me how he had just finished a condensed summary of the Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission’s report. The furore surrounding his sacking and subsequent reinstatement as chair of that body, had done nothing to diminish his passion for it. ‘I wrote a synopsis of the full report in 500 words. But they are good words,’ he added with pride.
Roger could barely walk and was in great discomfort, and yet, as his beloved wife Sophie told me, ‘He hasn’t spent a single day in bed’. When not writing, he was reading, amongst others, a book on Irish poet Seamus Heaney. ‘For whatever reason, I always ignored him. But now I see that he was a truly great poet.’
A few excerpts:
England, he once wrote, is an ‘imagined community’, by which he meant that it derives its personality from its customs, institutions, literature, music and religion. It, too, has a personality and character that invites love, respect and loyalty. But, as with all persons, it is no less susceptible to desecration. Love, morality, culture and sacred values are all fragile things that take many generations to build up, but only a day to tear down. If our common home consists of such things, it is because it is also a thing of intrinsic value. For Scruton, England was less a place than a matrix of meaning from which people could ‘stand, as it were, at the window of our empirical world and gaze out towards the transcendental’. Radicals of all stripes attempt to smash that window, but, in the way that he lives and loves, the conservationist shows that we human beings ‘have an innate need to conceptualise our world in terms of the transcendental’, and, in so doing, ‘to live out the distinction between the sacred and the profane’.
***
In a poignant essay from 2005, entitled ‘Dying Quietly’, Scruton wrote that ‘My death is not simply, for me, the death of RS, the event about which you might read in an obituary. It is a vast crisis, standing athwart my life and commanding me to prepare for it…Every death prompts the search for meaning – especially the death of someone loved. But my death challenges me in another way; its inevitability is like a command – namely, live your life so that this will be part of it and not just an end to it. St. Paul reminds us that “in the midst of life we are in death” meaning that our normal ways of living forbid us to plan either the time or the manner of our extinction. Yet we need to live in such a way that death, when it comes, is not a catastrophe but (if possible) a culmination – a conclusion to our actions that can be read back into all that preceded it and show it to be worthwhile’.
In the quiet and dignified way in which he died Roger Scruton testified to the truth of his own words. For many people, his death was, indeed, a catastrophe – the loss of someone who had given them hope in dark times. And yet, as I glanced at him for the last time, I saw a smiling man whose end was the conclusion he had always hoped for and richly deserved. It was a fitting conclusion that rendered his brave and beautiful life profoundly worthwhile.
Read the whole thing here.
Tags: Mark Dooley, Roger Scruton, Seamus Heaney