Yesterday Saturday June 11 2016 was a special day for Philosophy and Art. Roger Scruton will be knighted by the Queen of England for her 90th Birthday. I had the privilege to share the same fellowship with Roger and each time it was a delight of elegance and intelligence.
Inside Aldourie Castle in the home of George Watts, the symbolist painter, surrounded by the red tapestries, a fake door hidden behind a painting and an original death mask of William Blake, I remember asking him if he knew why the magnificent poet Holderlin became crazy and he responded as we say in french with fulgurance ''that is what happens to the best of us." It is always an admirable emotion when you hear the answer coming out of the mind of this great man, which you yourself have in your own mind.
One night we were all sitting in the tea room by the Lochness, all of us sarcophaged in dignity - I remember thinking... there should be a specimen of a spine from the sacrum to the ossified vertebras up to the last vertebras of an Oxford student in a bell jar inside the Museum of Natural History of every country, to show the world what dignification means.
I saw him again a year later at the Foundation Cini as I was presenting my movie on sculpture in which the nucleus of my philosophy was out in the world for the first time. At night, after the projection of the movie, he broke from the group and kindly found me outside the convent where we were all in black tie waiting for the rivas to take us to dinner on a floating Palazzo to tell me how much he enjoyed the movie.
He said this with a radiant benevolence.
Yesterday it is not Roger Scruton who has been knighted, it is Benevolence and Philosophy that has been knighted. Dear Roger you were already a knight...
