The tomb of the Count of Urgell at The Cloisters Museum

“JOURNEY” is a much abused and over-used word. So much so that it is almost impossible to use it today without conjuring a New-Agey binge of self worship. But, on the second anniversary of the death of the formidable writer Lawrence Auster, I am drawn to think of his journey.

He was born in New Jersey in 1949. He was born at the right time and at the wrong time. He was constantly at odds with his surroundings. He had a happy childhood, he said, but then plainly didn’t quite fit in anywhere. Hence he was on a constant journey. He left Columbia University after a year and went to Colorado. Later, after graduating from the University of Colorado with a degree in English, he discarded the idea of becoming an academic despite his love of English literature and his obvious skill in analyzing it. He thought being a professor would destroy his love of literature. He returned to New York, a wayfarer still.

For awhile he attended law school in New York and objected to the whole mentality of it. He felt law could be practiced in such a way that it wasn’t so careerist. In other words, the true end and object of legal studies should be justice, not the career.

He deplored the impersonal quality of modern life, which is why he left Columbia as an undergraduate and one reason he could never find a career. He wrote in his journal that he would love to work in some family business that had been run for generations. In other words, he would love to work in some business that wasn’t motivated just by business, but by the preservation of a small, human society.

He decried the lack of manners he saw everywhere, absurdly and unreasonably expecting civility and gentlemanliness in a 21st century city. At the same time, he could be rude himself in that aggressive, New York way.

He was walking down a street in New York one day, when like a bolt of lightning it struck him that European America was dying and being replaced by a modern, polyglot Tower of Babel. He journeyed through poverty, loneliness, lacerating self-criticism and the self-disgust any reasonable person in our world would feel for writing about one of the most sensitive of topics: Race in America. His objection to modern racial egalitarianism flowed naturally from his objection to the impersonal qualities of modern life. Destroy a man’s people, perpetuate the myth of rootlessness, and modern man is truly alone. He is even alienated from God. Mr. Auster was his own harshest critic at times and did not delight in the hard truths. His many readers at his website View from the Right would say he was born at the right time.

“This was the height of Western Civilization!” he said once, with outspread arms on a visit to The Cloisters, the famous museum of medieval art on the Hudson. So you see: He really was an outsider. He admired the tombs of the ancient knights, with their effigies of warriors at rest. He said that the art of no other age expressed the same vivid sense of transcendence.

A child of the sixties, he journeyed theologically, through his childhood as a Jew, astrology, the works of the Indian guru, Meher Baba; Anglicanism and finally, on Palm Sunday two years ago, with an Easter lily on his hospital tray, he formally converted to Roman Catholicism, a few days before he died and after much serious consideration of the issue. He said it was the most important day of his life. I like to think that he was formally initiated into that society of knights, his warrior qualities finding their most appropriate setting.

I hope you will join with me today, on Palm Sunday, which marks the entry of that most miraculous God-Man and Jew into Jerusalem, in praying for the eternal rest of Lawrence Auster. His journey is over. Let us be glad  that he never fit into this world. Let us be thankful that it was always alien to him, as it should be to all of us. Let us pray for him and imagine him in heaven, poor no more, but with a golden and bejeweled sword always by his side.

[Note: Friends of Lawrence Auster will be gathering soon for a visit to his grave and lunch to commemorate the second anniversary of his death. This will take place near the cemetery where he is buried in suburban Philadelphia. If you would like to join us, please let me know.]

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