“Being incarnate was an embarrassment, a design-fault that God may have intended in the Italians but surely not in the English.”

On the English supposed “quiet suspicion of sensuality” that he saw in the old English. It made me laugh out loud.

“Sexual puritanism is an attempt to safeguard possessions more valuable than pleasure. The good that it does outweighs the evil, the English knew this. They were seriously repressed, largely because repression prevented them from carelessly throwing away those things—chastity, marriage and the family—which slip so easily from the grasp of people whose natural tendency is to keep each other at a distance.”

This captures why my sexual ethics.

“Much as we should be grateful for the language and liturgy of the Anglican Church, we must deplore the weird interdiction which killed of polyphony at the very moment when Tallis and Byrd…had learned to rival Palestrina and Victoria in this supremely religious art form.”

The Anglicans outlawed polyphony?

“Jesus, the first and last, On thee my soul is cast: Thou didst the work begin By blotting out my sin; Thou wilt the root remove, And perfect me in love.

“Yet when the work is done The work is but begun: Partaker of thy grace, I long to see thy face; The first I prove below, The last I die to know” (105, from the Book of Common Prayer).

It’s the last couplet that excites me most.

“…we belted out this famous hymn…to the music of Mendelssohn, that gentle fellow-traveller of the Christian faith whom Queen Victoria, then head of the Anglican Church, took to her heart, as the Church did also, despite the fact, and also because of the fact, that he was a Jew.”

Mendelssohn was a Jew!? He has written some of the strongest Christian sacred music of all time!

“…and the very irrelevance to the surrounding world of everything he knew made the learning of it all the more rewarding” (167).

Is this true?

“By devoting their formative years to useless things, they made themselves supremely useful” (170).

A rhetorically fun point that Scruton makes about English Liberal Arts education. I do wonder if it’s true.

“How, for example, can you represent the interests of dead and unborn Englishmen, merely by counting the votes of the living? And how, in a system where important issues are determined by majority voting, do we protect the dissident minority, the individual eccentric, the person who will not or cannot conform?” (174)

I love the idea of thinking in terms of representing future, unborn compatriots in one’s government. And I appreciate Scruton’s praise for the common law in England which enables such lawmaking.

“Without what Freud call the ‘work of mourning’ we are diminished by our losses, and unable to live to the full beyond them” (244).

I know this to be true. I wonder whether I’m doing it for my mom. I want to make sure I make plenty space for others to mourn when I die.

“For dead civilizations can speak to living people, and the more conscious they are while dying, the more fertile is their influence thereafter” (244).

The same is true of dead people. I wish to be conscious while I’m dying.

Scruton, Roger. England : an elegy. London: Chatto & Windus, 2000. Print.