Stylist.

WHAT made Bill Buckley such an effective writer? Let's pass over such pedestrian contingencies as truthful statements expressed in elegant English. Any gently educated citizen ought to be able to manage that. (Notice, you teachers, I say "ought.") And we can also leave to one side the stadium-sized warehouse of cultural reference, the easy commerce with the literatures of several languages, the communicable humor, the unerring sense of political relevance. Bill's rhetorical armory deployed all that and more--a delicate sense of irony, a worldliness that was disabused but never jaded, a formidable vocabulary that commanded not just words but whole armadas of sense and sensibility.

Those qualities are some of the appoggiature of style that Bill deployed in his writing. But the magic leaven lay elsewhere. Above all, I suspect, it was inseparable from--in some ways it was an expression of--Bill's irrepressible curiosity about the animating mechanics of the world around him. Bill's style was at once seductively confidential--he always seemed to be writing for you--and magnificently selfless. His focus was adamantly outwards, gloriously involved with the particularities of his latest adventure. Socrates may or may not have been right that "the unexamined life is not worth living." Bill indisputably showed that the unexamined world just won't cut it. "The entertainment committee," he liked to say, "never sleeps."

Bill's love of gadgets has been often remarked. In many ways, he regarded the entire world as his gadget, and he never considered a gadget fully mastered until he had both plumbed its intricacies himself and anatomized them for his chosen readership. His writing was didactic without didacticism. Sailing. Skiing. Playing the piano or harpsichord. Learning celestial navigation. Decisions about word usage or online dictionaries. Animadversions about the habit of serving a salad course at public functions. The particular virtues and defining idiosyncrasies of friends, colleagues, debating partners, even pets. He writes an essay about the life of a public speaker, and you do not simply eavesdrop on a notable practitioner of that art, you feel its rewards--and its rigors--from within. You also get passels of valuable practical advice. Specify, when arranging for someone to meet you, a slightly unorthodox time: Your ride to the airport is more likely to be punctual if you say 7:35 instead of 7:30. ("If you were back at the CIA," Bill revealed, "you'd say 7:33.") When you arrive at an untested lecture venue, be blunt: "I see dinner is at six. Will they be serving wine?"

"Apopemptic" is one of several linguistic curiosities I learned from Bill. It was, it saddens me to say, one of his favorite words in recent months. It means "valedictory." Bill Buckley was that rare creature whose effective writing was transparently a coefficient of effervescently effective living. Farewells are often difficult. I've never had one harder.

Mr. Kimball is co-editor and co-publisher of The New Criterion.