(* I'm no prude, but I cannot abide gratuitous profanity; the "*" represents one of Wm. F's favorites.)
I am, by and large, a fiscal conservative and social liberal, so I'm generally in agreement with the late Mr. Buckley and with the late Barry Goldwater, Air Force general and senator from Arizona. I am mid-way through a slim volume of Goldwater's called "The conscience of a conservative" to which Pat Buchanan's front matter is far too long.
I enjoy Buckley's writing more than his political philosophy. He was a bit of a curmudgeon, but he certainly has a way with words. I found paragraphs in the book which brought to mind a Hemingway bullfight scene of 102 or so words.
There is an art to stringing together more than a few words while still maintaining reader comprehension. Hemingway used it so well readers, reading the prose aloud, automatically pause for a breath where a comma appears in the text. There is tension in Hemingway's work.
An aside. Buckley is dead. The book I was reading is copyright 2007. Yet I write in the present tense, as if Buckley is alive and well. THAT is the legacy of the written word.
I came by the Buckley and Goldwater books thanks to my two boys who gave me a gift card to a local book purveyor. The two books were marked down, as was "The traveling curmudgeon," a book of comments by, mostly, professional travelers that I acquired at the same time. I interrupted that book to read Buckley.
Abba Eban, also "late," had a way with words. Eban had a way with English words, with Hebrew words, and even Arabic words. Perhaps other languages as well. I have a copy of Eban's "My People" in his second language which I bought when I lived in the country he represented in the (dis)United Nations.
Perhaps because I spent a few years in the writing business, and most of that obliged to write short paragraphs of even shorter sentences, I enjoy the opportunity to read the work of people lacking the constraints placed on my wordsmithing.
Writing, like oratory, is becoming a lost art.
While I have heard a number of famous people speak, only one - Hubert Horatio Humphrey, Jr., a gentleman with whom I was not generally in political agreement - was able to capture and hold my undivided attention. He spoke, with little preparation, at a hastily convened event in Harrisburg PA when he was a guest of then governor Milton Shapp (which dates the event).
I don't aspire to write like Buckley or speak like Humphrey, but I appreciate their skills and envy their command of the language. Reading them or listening to them is as much a pleasure, politics aside, as listening to good music (and that, too, spans a broad spectrum).
Yohanon Yohanon.Glenn @ gmail.com
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