An inward turn.

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, by Roger Scruton (Continuum, 256 pp., $28.95)

MOST readers of National Review know of Roger Scruton, the English philosopher, opera composer, rider to hounds, anti-Communist agitator, polemicist, and author of a long shelf of books. But I would wager that few readers are acquainted with the creature who emerges from Gentle Regrets, Scruton's wistful, magnanimous, and ineluctably intelligent memoir. For while there are a few grains of philosophy in this book, something about music and opera, a chapter about horses and hunting, and a handful of intellectual and political battles recalled, Roger Scruton the public personage is only intermittently on view. Instead we are introduced to a shy, even timid, boy. He has red hair--horrors! His father, a bitter, lower-middle-class socialist, resents Roger's existence almost as much as he resents his own. His mother, in a desperate bid for refinement, calls him "Vernon" (his middle name, but how could fate be so cruel?).

The story of Scruton's childhood features a dialogue, sometimes a duel, between Vernon, the sensitive boy who is fond of books and music, and Roger, the rebel "with a talent for home-made bombs," whose belligerence was transmogrified, if not tamed, when he, too, began to share Vemon's intellectual and aesthetic passions. Roger was the official winner, beginning that fateful day on the school playground when a bully named Herman, who pronounced anathema upon red hair and all its works, intersected decisively with Roger's stationary, outstretched fist. "Henceforth," Scruton reports, "I was Roger to everyone, including my family, who were told that the choice was simple: Either they ceased to call me Vernon, or I went to live with the gypsies."

There are two main themes in this book. One is gratitude, late won. The other is loss, its recuperative powers.

Scruton invites readers to witness the spectacle of his sentimental education, from his encounter with Pilgrim "s Progress when he was 13--"suddenly I was in a visionary landscape, where even the most ordinary things come dressed in astonishment"--through his flirtation with radicalism and subsequent disillusionment with prophets of disillusion, Scruton won a scholarship to Cambridge, performed brilliantly, and, in a normal world, would have gone on to enjoy a brilliant academic career. But normality is the least normal thing. And so Scruton's primary adventures in academia, first at Birkbeck College, London, and then at Boston University, were rocky. BU provided a sympathetic setting, largely because its president at the time, John Silber, had the courage to resist the philosophy of political correctness, according to which all points of view are eagerly embraced except those that are conservative or that otherwise take issue with left-wing orthodoxy.

But quotidian academia was not welcoming to Scruton. He had perpetrated the ghastly error of entertaining conservative opinions, an error compounded by the bad taste of defending those opinions with scarifying wit and rhetorical skill. Imagine: an intelligent conservative, skilled in argument. Such a beast was not only rare, its presence was unforgivable. The temerity of someone swanning into the common rooms of modern cultural life and pointing out their intellectual and moral deficiencies! When Isaiah Berlin turned 80, Scruton had the effrontery to publish an article that was not wholly sycophantic. The result was instant ostracism from an academic establishment that encouraged openness and debate about everything except its own pieties. When Scruton published a book with Longman's, another philosopher took it upon himself to write to the publisher: "I may tell you with dismay that many colleagues here [in Oxford] feel that the Longman imprint--a respected one--has been tarnished by association with Scruton's work."

Tough words, but Scruton learned to take it in stride. "In time, I came to see that he was right. Someone who believes in real distinctions between people has no place in a humanities department, the main purpose of which is to deliver the ideology required by life in the postmodern world." so Scruton withdrew from the groves of academia to devote himself to writing, composing music, and tending his farm in Wiltshire.

Gentle Regrets is the record of an extraordinary life, minuted "Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita." Scruton's readers in Britain and America are grateful for or infuriated by his books and articles, but in Eastern Europe Scruton is known perhaps less as an author than as an architect of liberty. He worked long and hard in the 1980s in samizdat enclaves to help smash the tyrannous yoke of Communism, and was duly followed, harassed, and roughed up by the secret police for his efforts. No wonder that semi-recumbent Oxford don felt that a publisher's good name might be "tarnished by association with Scruton's work."

The book also contains many memorable portraits of Scruton's friends, teachers, inspirations, antagonists: Ivor Deas, the self-effacing town librarian who introduced Scruton to the world of books; Peter Fuller, the passionate former Marxist and art critic who, for a brief moment before his untimely death, revivified British art criticism; Maurice Cowling, the extraordinary Peterhouse don who was mentor to a generation of intellectual dissenters. There are the three Sams in Scruton's life: a disagreeable mutt he cared for and loved as a child, a horse that helps to complete his training as a horseman, and finally his son. Particularly touching are Scruton's pages about Monsignor Gilbey, the Catholic chaplain at Cambridge, "a genuinely holy man, who attempted to synthesize the worldly competence of the gentleman, the sacrificial ardours of the saint, and the contemplative invulnerability of the monk into a single shining ideal." How refreshing to learn that Monsignor Gilbey taught that the duty of the Christian is not to leave the world a better place but to leave the world a better man.

Gentle Regrets is full of wise obiter dicta, e.g., that "there is no weapon in the armory of nothingness more lethal than TV," whose main purpose is "to ephemeralize our affections by putting momentary fantasy in the place of lasting curiosity and voyeuristic appetite in the place of feeling." Or this: Muslims, who are so obviously in the business of social as well as biological reproduction, "show us what we really stand to lose, if we hold nothing sacred: namely, the future."

Intellectually, the most thrilling part of Scruton's book is the chapter called "How I Became a Conservative." It opens in 1968 in Paris with slogans, shattered shop windows, and spoiled radicals. It ends with Scruton's encounter with the philosophy of Edmund Burke, that apostle of tradition, authority, and prejudice. Prejudice? How awful that word sounds to enlightened ears. But Scruton reminds us that prejudice, far from being synonymous with bigotry, can, rightly understood, be a prime resource in freedom's armory. "Our most necessary beliefs," Scruton writes, "may be both unjustified and unjustifiable from our own perspective, and ... the attempt to justify them will lead merely to their loss.... The real justification for a prejudice is the one that justifies it as a prejudice, rather than as a rational conclusion of an argument." Burke saw with penetrating insight that freedom was not the antonym of authority or the repudiation of obedience. "Real freedom," writes Scruton, "concrete freedom, the freedom that can actually be defined, claimed and granted, was not the opposite of obedience but its other side. The abstract, unreal freedom of the liberal intellect was really nothing more than childish disobedience, amplified into anarchy." Scruton's absorption of Burke's teaching marked the onset of political maturity, the emancipation from fantasies of groundless emancipation whose name is "utopia," Greek for "nowhere."

If there is a subtext in Gentle Regrets, it involves the Burkean theme that the pursuit of utopia (or call it "socialism" if you prefer a modern title) always ends badly. The recognition of that truth comes not all at once, and depends less upon intellectual acknowledgment than upon spiritual awakening. Scruton comes bearing news about permanent things, one part of which is the evanescence of human aspiration. Hence the governing word "loss." There is a sense in which conservatism is anti-Romantic, since it is constitutionally suspicious of the schemes of perfection Romanticism typically espouses. But there is another sense in which conservatism is deeply Romantic: the sense in which it recognizes and embraces the ineradicable frailty, the ultimate futility of things human. "And so," Scruton writes at the end of his chapter on Burke, "I acquired the consciousness of death and dying, without which the world cannot be loved for what it is. That, in essence, is what it means to be a conservative." Which is to say that without the consciousness of loss, there is nothing a conservative would find worth conserving. It is only by facing up to necessary loss, Scruton writes, that we can build on the dream of ultimate recuperati on.

The philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once wrote that religion teaches us how to be a failure. In the essay "Regaining My Religion," which concludes Gentle Regrets, Scruton endorses that insight and shows how one of the most harrowing depredations of the modern world is to rob us of the religious sense, which is to say the sense of loss. Too often, he notes, "there is neither love nor happiness--only fun. For us, one might be tempted to suggest, the loss of religion is the loss of loss." The central teaching of this wise and companionable book is that the acknowledgment of loss is not the end but the prelude to the possession of joy.

Mr. Kimball is the publisher of Encounter Books, and the co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion.