Our family has gone from the sublime to the tragic today. At 2:00 in Atlanta we heard the gifted composer Howard Shore conduct the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus in his "Lord of the Rings Symphony." It was two hours of stunning, stirring beauty. Afterwards, we started the long road for home via I-20, not listening to the radio but to the Lord of the Rings soundtrack.
Now on arrival at a Best Western in Tuscaloosa, Alabama we turn on Fox News Channel to find the news that former President Ronald Reagan has died after his long, twilight struggle with Alzheimer's.
There will be an outpouring of tribute and reminiscence in the coming days, all well deserved because Ronald Reagan was a truly great man and one of the greatest presidents of the United States during the twentieth century.
A reader has written to NRO's The Corner to say the following, which is both insightful and timely for us today:
This will perhaps sound cheesy, but I've always thought of Reagan as America's Gandalf. If you read the Silmarillion--and pay careful attention to passages about Gandalf in LOTR--you learn that Gandalf is a figure sent to bring hope, encouragement, and wisdom to Middle Earth as it faced it's Great Enemy:“Other evils may come; for Sauron is himself but a servant or emissary. Yet it is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till. What weather they shall have is not ours to rule." --Tolkien, LOTR (Bk. V, Ch. 9, p. 190).
"They say the world has become too complex for simple answers. They are wrong. There are no easy answers, but there are simple answers. We must have the courage to do what we know is morally right. Winston Churchill said that "the destiny of man is not measured by material computation. When great forces are on the move in the world, we learn we are spirits -- not animals." And he said, "There is something going on in time and space, and beyond time and space, which, whether we like it or not, spells duty." -- Ronald Reagan
Rest in peace.
Posted by Alan at June 5, 2004 08:54 PM