Recovering the Holy (Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life) (Book Review‪)‬

Gentle Regrets: Thoughts from a Life, by Roger Scruton, London and New York: Continuum International, 2006. 256 pp. ROGER VERNON SCRUTON is standing at night in a quiet street in Prague, listening. It is the early 1980s, well before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He stands in a dark street "where street lighting was sparse, where cars were an object of suspicion, and where few people ventured after dark" and he listens to the quiet sounds of a city sleeping: "the turning of a key in the latch; a window opening; the flapping of curtains in a sudden breeze." He has slipped away from his government watcher and takes a moment to reflect on a city that died when the communists took charge. He listens to the sounds of a people falling into a common sleep, people who by day avoid each other or speak to each other "only in the cautious and shifty way that the Party required of them." But at night they sleep in their city and wait. And the listener waits too, for "the ghost of this historic city to return and tell of a community living in peace, working, resting and praying as one."