Richard Spencer

February 11, 2009

This is very sad news:

All things must end, and Fred on Everything just has. This will be the last regular column, although the site will stay up and I’ll add things from time to time as the mood urges.
[…]

[I had] hope[d] that, however minor my voice might be, in combination with thousands of others it might engender pressure for slowing the rush into the high-tech medieval twilight that the culture has undertaken.

This by now is clearly quixotic. The civilizational changes we now see are both irremediable and beyond control. The peasantrification and empty glitter of society, pervasive hostility to careful thought, onrushing authoritarianism, and distaste for cultivation are now endemic. I do not know where these lead, but we are assuredly going to get there. Fuming buys nothing.

I have just turned 63. Judging by familial history I have ten to fifteen years left on the planet. I have no intention of spending them railing against the inevitable. Books need my reading when I again can, sunsets my supervision, Padre Kino my drinking. Nepal, I am persuaded, cannot survive without my doing some serious trekking over it. I cannot let an entire country die for want of my attention. There are crazy friends from distant times and far places with whom I need to eat noodles in various remote back streets and tell lies. Equally crazy daughters require my time. And I require theirs.

Fred is irreplaceable.

[Hat tip: LRC]