One More Epicycle

WFB, as quoted by Norman Podhoretz:

.. if there were nothing to complain about, there would be no post-Adamite mankind. But complaint is profanation in the absence of gratitude. There is much to complain about in America, but that awful keening noise one unhappily gets so used to makes no way for the bells, and these have rung for America, are still ringing for America, and for this we are obliged to be grateful. To be otherwise is wrong reason, and a poetical invitation to true national tribulation. I must remember to pray more often, because providence has given us the means to make the struggle, and in this respect we are singularly blessed in this country, and in this room.

And on what WFB considered above all:

I am programmed to love God and to seek, however vainly, to obey him, and to trust that the course he laid out for me in the grandest voyage, through time and space, and uncertainty, to infinity and transfiguration, and resolution, is as certainly charted as the toyland course that will lead me from Miami to the Rock of Gibraltar.

I shall follow the star of Bethlehem, waywardly; and if I fail to reach it, I shall be guilty of every delinquency save that I ever doubted it was there.

William F. Buckley, 1925-2008. Requiescat in pacem.