Saturday, June 17, 2017

Singular..................................


      How did he live such a life, so hectic with public concerns, while preoccupying himself so fully with individual human beings:  whose torments, never mind their singularity, he adopted as his own, with the passion that some give only to the universal?  Eleanor Roosevelt, James Burnham once mused, looked on all the world as her personal slum project.  Although he was at home with collectivist formulations, one had the impression of Allard Lowenstein that he might be late in aborting a Third World War - because of his absorption with the problems of one sophomore.  Oh, they followed him everywhere;  because we experienced in him the essence of an entirely personal dedication.  Of all the partisans I have known, from the furthest steppes of the spectrum, his was the most undistracted concern, not for humanity - thought he was conversant with big-think idiom - but with human beings.

-William F. Buckley, Jr., A Torch Kept Lit:  Great Lives of the Twentieth Century;  Allard Lowenstein, RIP

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