I had the good fortune to stumble across Roger Scruton's Gentle Regrets. It has the unusual virtue of being the sort of book I might recommend to anyone: either it will be usefully vexing, or it will give one such a shock of recognition that one will be kicked out of the sitting room for reading too many passages aloud. My response was the latter, as you may have guessed.

"The works of our culture were not mysterious to us, but merely deep, in the way that the face of a mother is deep to the eyes of her child." Or, "I suppose that underlying that sense of loss is the permanent belief that what has been lost can also be recaptured -- not necessarily as it was when it first slipped from our grasp, but as it will be when consciously regained and remodelled, to reward us for the toil of separation through which we are condemned by our original transgression. That belief is the romantic core of conservatism, as you find it -- very differently expressed -- in Burke and Hegel, in Coleridge, Ruskin, Dostoevsky, and T. S. Eliot."

I might add that that sense of loss is the reason I adore Epictetus and consider Marcus Aurelius not worth re-reading. And there were other moments of amazed discovery. For example, he and I favored the same reagents for our exothermic experimentation: "I was an accomplished fouler of the nest, and used my knowledge of chemistry to blow up small but significant parts of the school facilities with chlorate bombs and nitrogen tri-iodide."

I never inflicted any damage on my school, desire it as I did, and the only time we were ever truly evacuated was due to some picric acid someone had let dry. But a certain number of blasts and bangs could be heard in the forest behind my house, c. 1989-1997.

These chemical effusions children are so given to form their characters inimitably. A steady hand, a cool eye, grace under pressure, the ability to move quickly, and the stoicism to dig out the shrapnel and treat the burns oneself: these qualities are what make the boys and girls of today into the men and women of tomorrow. And should we lose a few -- well, nobody needs a clumsy chemist. Dealing with nitrogen tri-iodide alone taught me a great deal more about useful safety precautions than any lab class since.

Post script:

Hey kids. Don't blow yourselves up. Because that's not cool.

UPDATE: I forgot the best part! He also has sensible things to say about opera!

For the chances are that what you will see on stage will have nothing to do with what you hear from the pit. The habit has grown of ignoring not merely the stage directions given by the composer, but also the spirit of the music, the sense of the words, and even the nature of the drama. A nineteenth-century opera may be set in Hitler's Germany, so that the producer can reveal that he is, contrary to rumour, sound on the Nazi question. Or it may be transported, like Wagner's Ring, to the world of industrial capitalism, so that the producer can show that he too has read Feuerbach, Marx and Bernard Shaw. [Or, more likely these corrupt times, wants to pretend so. --O.]

--

There are special reasons, of course, for the mutilation of Wagner. For Wagner's dramas concern sacred things, and sacred things are intolerable to those who no longer believe in them: an urge to desecrate replaces the desire to worship and -- just as in periods of religious iconoclasm, such as that which destroyed the interiors of our English churches -- the finest and most beautiful symbols are torn down and trampled on, lest they retain their power over the human soul. That is why Siegfried is wearing schoolboy shorts and carrying a satchel; it is why Wotan is encumbered with a suitcase, a bicycle, a teddy bear or a mobile telephone. These are moralizing gestures on the producer's part, warnings against corruption and deliberate gestures of mockery towards gods that have died. Moreover, it was Wagner who made the greatest claim for opera as the equivalent for the modern world of the Greek tragic stage: a festival experience in which the spirit of religion lives as it can no longer live (according to Wagner) except in art.

It shows great restraint on my part that I stop here and do not quote his remarks on Pelleas et Melisande. Go read it yourself, anyhoo.