The dregs of the night . . .

and I've just begun reading Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. In his 1986 Foreword, Kirk reminds us that " . . . the noun 'conservative' signifies guardian or defender, the conservator." And rather plaintively -- and even, perhaps, rather prematurely and pessimistically, for a world that was poised on the brink of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union-- Kirk asks, "When the Kingdom of Man is harvested and found to be a yield of tares, fit only for burning -- why, will nothing of our civilization be spared?"

I call Kirk's cry of the heart pessimistic, but at this hour of the night, without the voices of my children as a counter-balance to the gloom, and sans the recording of Dido's Lament with which my husband has lately been punctuating our precious few moments of leisure, with only a Whartonian sense of having built our nest on the edge of a precipice, I am wholly attuned to Kirk's warning. I think of all the things we denizens of the Kingdom of Man seem to have decided we could do without: decency, civility, honor, modesty, shame, formality, custom, even history. I hear the "melancholy, long, withdrawing roar" of many of those quaint notions in our modern age, and I myself have all too eagerly chucked some of those ideas into the retreating tide.

We keep throwing things overboard. How soon before we regret their loss, before we decide they were things we really needed after all?