21 Replies to “Rest In Peace”

  3. “And God shall wipe away all tears”: not mine this minute.
    Bill Buckley is one of the great ones: he was, in many ways the father or, at least, the midwife of American conservatism in the 20th century. I’m sure that many of us would not be here at SDA without his influence.
    After reading Kate’s link: in the here and now, the joyful thought of the courageous and sometimes cantankerous Bill Buckley (a cradle Catholic) and Malcolm Muggeridge, a convert to Catholicism as I am, celebrating life and faith together in the hereafter has actually wiped away my tears. As C.S. Lewis describes it, they are no less real now. In fact, they are more real, as they “move further up and further in”.
    For Bill Buckley, from the Russian Contakion of the Departed—in the Kieff Melody, with the bass dropping the octave: “Give rest, O Christ, to thy servant with thy Saints: where sorrow and pain are no more; neither sighing, but life everlasting . . . All we go down to the dust: weeping o’er the grave we make our song: Alleluia! Alleluia! Alleluia!”

  4. After editing, one should always read the whole thing again. E.g., It’s not my tears that are moving “further up . . . ” but Messrs Muggeridge and Buckley!

  7. “I get satisfaction of three kinds. One is creating something, one is being paid for it and one is the feeling that I haven’t just been sitting on my ass all afternoon.”
    William F Buckley
    Nov 24 1925 – Feb 27 2008

  8. Rest in Peace, Bill.
    “Idealism is fine, but as it approaches reality, the costs become prohibitive.”
    William F. Buckley, Jr.
    “It had all the earmarks of a CIA operation; the bomb killed everybody in the room except the intended target!”
    William F. Buckley, Jr.

  10. My only significant memory of Wm. F. Buckley, Jr., is an interview he did with the Rt. Hon. J. Enoch Powell. “Rivers of Blood” Powell made him look like a 10-year-old schoolboy trying to outreason Lord Denning, M.R. Still, I can’t blame Buckley for not understanding that “Great Britain” and “United Kingdom” are not synonyms. He certainly wasn’t a bad sort.

  11. One lecture I remember of Buckley’s was to a group of black students who were complaining that the standards to get into MIT were too hard. He said to them: you have two choices here, you can work harder and make those standards and you win or you all demand to have those standards lowered and if they are.. we all lose.
    Brilliant man and a great loss to us all.

  13. “He was a man devoted to the notion that both words and ideas have a basic, intrinsic value, even apart from the political and cultural battles to which they are attached. This was obvious in every sentence he wrote, every word he uttered. His natural talent with language was simply extraordinary, as was the depth and clarity of his understanding. He was not merely clever and smart; he was wise. Conservatism lost a great defender and advocate today, and the larger world of ideas and letters lost one of its greatest minds.”– Peter Soderman ttp://theamericanscene.com/2008/02/27/wfb-rip

  14. he was a brilliant man. loved to read his work and loved to listen to him speak, what a vocabulary.

  15. Buckley left us a lot of material. I have only read a small portion of it. One that I read about a year ago was his first book, “God and Man at Yale.” A fantastic read, and as pertinent and useful today as it was in 1950’s.
    Rest in Peace, William.

  17. Last night, I finished reading his book Windfall: The End of the Affair, about his Atlantic crossing (I think it was his fourth, and last) with his son and a bunch of close friends in a boat called Sealestial.
    I thought about what a remarkable man he is, and was astonished to hear on returning home from work that he died today.
    A Renaissance Man.
    RIP, Mr. Buckley. You were one of a kind.
    My light perpetual shine upon you.

  19. Just before the last chapter in Wind Fall, entitled Final Days, there is an entry from Christopher Buckley’s (WFB’s only son) sea-voyage journal:
    “Thoughts on birthday [of WFB]. In 1975, he was fifty and I was twenty-three. Fifteen years from now, he will be eighty, and I, fifty-three. (The mind boggling.)…I make these reflections without morbidity, much as it is inconceivable to imagine a world without Pup. I remember a Zen koan within a koan from years back.
    “‘A lord summoned a monk and asked him to devise a koan celebrating his family. The monk went off to contemplate, and returned, presenting the lord with a scroll upon which were the words:
    Grandfather dies,
    Father dies,
    Son dies.
    “The lord was furious. ‘I ask you to give me something to express my joy, and you bring me this?’ He was about to order a soldier to behead the monk when the monk said, ‘No father lives longer than his son. Therein lies truest happiness.’
    “The lord ordered the soldier to sheath his sword.”

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