Oliver Letwin makes some elegant comments in The Spectator. And no, I for one would cringe at a statue of MO. The quotes below, especially the first, sound as if they came from the pen of Walker Percy.
The Notebooks bring out this quality, letting us into some of the smouldering passions that lay behind the extreme delicacy of his conversational manner. There is much reflection on God, and on the history of man’s relation to the numinous in nature. In 1923, we find Oakeshott pondering (over successive days) on the ‘experience of the Red Sea in the history of the Jews’ and on the sea as the symbol of the ‘mightiness of God’. ‘The stars have lost much of their mystery — but who would dare to say that he had discovered the secret of the sea?’
He preferred instead to rest on what Housman (I think his favourite poet) once called the idle hill of summer. From this pleasing vantage point, he discerned with subtle charm significant features entirely missed by caravans of earnest travellers making their way solemnly but unseeingly across the landscape.
manwithoutqualities 