Tuesday, October 27, 2009

A (Pregnant?) Pause

Eve Tushnet and I were talking about WFB and she asked me which public intellectuals I admired today. (I dislike the phrase, but it is current, so let it pass.) I came up with three names — George W. S. Trow, for Within the Context of No Context; Camille Paglia, for the opening chapters of Sexual Personae; and V. S. Naipaul, for what, everyone knows — but thought, even as I did so, that there is something melancholy about that list. Trow is dead; Paglia and Naipaul are with us, but repeating or at best building on work of earlier decades. One could think of other names — Paul Berman on terrorism; the post-9/11 Christopher Hitchens when he is not tootling in the Atheist Salvation Army Band — but it does suggest that we are waiting for the next thing. 

Two caveats: Good things remain good even though they are old; and even old things are new to those who discover them for the first time. When I discovered National Review the major columnists — James Burnham, Russell Kirk, Frank Meyer, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn — had been pulling their oars in the magazine for 15 years, some of them for longer than that elsewhere (see chapters 1 and 2 of RTRP).  That didn't stop me from learning a lot from them.

Still, if you see a strange, interesting man talking to himself . . .

10/27 11:00 PMShare