I would like to share the following recollection concerning WFB Jr.
I have the text of a letter I saved from a conservative newsletter that I
coedited in spring of 1962 in high school. At the time I wrote Mr. Buckley
questioning the meaning of a passage in his most recent book, “Up
from Liberalism,” in which he made the statement that all essential
knowledge had already been discovered. He wrote me back the following
reply. Since the subject touches on death itself, I can think of no better
time than to send it than at the first milestone after his passing.

Dear Mr. Smith:

In the passage you quote from Up from Liberalism I intended, indeed, to
refer to the religious truth that is our central heritage and to the moral
philosophy and human insight that derive from it. Sometimes this position
is referred to (in a phrase going back, I believe, to the days of the
Roman Empire) as “the morality of the last days” — by which is meant the
world-view of men who know that death is close. But in the long view, we
all stand sentenced to death, and whether it comes in 1995 or tomorrow
makes no difference. That is why the morality of the last days always
applies to what is “finally important in human experience.” All our
techniques of social welfare, all our science, all our comfort, all our
liberty, all our democracy and foreign aid and grandiloquent orations
– all that means nothing to me and nothing to you in the moment when we go.
At that moment we must put our souls in order, and the way to do that was
lighted for us by Jesus, and since then we have had need of no other light.
That is what is finally important; it has not changed; and it will not
change. It is the truth, which shall ever abide in the future. And if it
is “reactionary” to hold a truth that will be valid for all future time,
then words have lost their meaning, and men their reason.

Yours faithfully,
William F. Buckley, Jr.