… seeks a path to affirmation. Schubert’s meditations on death, in the last piano sonata, D960, the slow movement of the String Quintet in C, D956, and the incomparable String Quartet in G major, D887, are among the profoundest testimonies in art to the beauty of life and the pain of losing it; they are also true gestures of acceptance – since that which is accepted is neither sentimentalized nor set aside, but confronted in all its unspeakable darkness.”
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[A] man of extraordinary intellect, learning and humour, a great supporter of central European dissidents, and the kind of provocative – sometimes outrageous – conservative thinker that a truly liberal society should be glad to have challenging it. Timothy Garton Ash
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Roger Scruton, 1944 – 2020
January 13th, 2020 at 8:08AM
After Samuel Johnson’s death, William Gerard Hamilton said, “He has made a chasm, which not only nothing can fill up, but which nothing has a tendency to fill up. –Johnson is dead.– Let us go to the next best: There is nobody; –no man can be said to put you in mind of Johnson.”
It works for Scruton as well.