Ben Jonson’s “To Penshurst” has received very little attention, no doubt because of the well known circumstance that Jonson himself is more honored than read. Yet “To Penshurst” is a memorable poem, and perhaps a great one. Civilization is memory. –Hugh Kenner I cannot do my duty as a true modern, by cursing everybody who [...]
If culture is simply a matter of private enthusiasms and hobbies, of small details and specialties, then what of a common culture? What about the collective project and shared sense of purpose that built Western civilization? “The expert takes a little subject for his province, and remains a provincial for the rest of his life.”—Jacques [...]
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 [...]
Books are liberating. Not all books, to be sure. Not the sort of books that are as bad as the fads they serve, the sort of books in which vanity vanquishes verity, and in which the passion for fashion crucifies truth. Not the sort of books that turn their readers into prisoners of the Spirit [...]
The subtext of YouTuber Richard Vobes’ journeys around England is that what is old, what has stood the test of time, deserves our veneration. In a throw-away culture when we are too distracted, too mesmerized by our technological gadgets to be able to engage in real wonder, Mr. Vobes provides us a means to move [...]
C.S. Lewis is recognized as a Christian lay apologist, a writer of children’s books, an adept novelist and fantasist, and a literary scholar and logician, still eliciting strong reactions, favorable or unfavorable, from his readers. On Friday, November 22, 1963, at about the same time as President John F. Kennedy prepared to enter the black [...]
The necessity of personal morality in a thriving community is denied by the enemies of the permanent things, who do not believe that there are permanent standards of behavior or indeed an unchanging human nature, and who seek to create political systems that will make everyone happy without much effort. Enemies of the Permanent Things: [...]
Buckley apparently did not resist the ideas of collectivism as successfully as he thought. Instead, he chose to aim for winning a contemporary battle rather than defending the Permanent Things… William F. Buckley’s God and Man at Yale is one of the classics of conservatism. Written in 1951 during the Cold War, the book is [...]
The West is dying because it has turned its back on the Permanent Things. But what will be left when the secularist “West” is dead?... I expected my recent essay “Race against Reason” to provoke an element of controversy and was not surprised when it elicited the following comment: Yes, this is all well and [...]
Of all Russell Kirk’s books, Enemies of the Permanent Things has the oddest history. Its origins were in the Darcy Lectures that Kirk delivered at Alabama College in 1958. Over the eleven years until its final publication, it evolved significantly, reflecting the evolution of Kirk’s own ideas, especially regarding T.S. Eliot. First appearing in print [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords readers the opportunity to join Ian Crowe as he explores the thought of T.S. Eliot, Edmund Burke on the permanent things. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher For the present is the point at which time touches eternity. —C.S. Lewis[1] It was in 1939, in The Idea of a [...]
The issues now being debated in the 2016 elections are framed as if the country revolved around a great big cookie jar. The benefits and promises candidates offer are like cookies that must be substantial, instantly gratifying, and abundant. All the problems the nation faces seem to be reduced to who has access to the [...]
Today’s offering in our Timeless Essay series affords our readers the opportunity to explore the nature of education and its relation to the permanent things, lest we become a class of barbarians. —W. Winston Elliott III, Publisher Education and the Permanent Things If we are going to transmit the permanent things, we will have to [...]
Permanence is not merely a matter of taste—something to be embraced by the sedentary and eschewed by the restless—but a deep societal value. It is the guardian of family, tradition, practical wisdom, environment, and culture On the whole, it would appear to be for the best that the great majority of human beings should go [...]