"And the Stars of Heaven Shall Fall"

A draft chapter of a memoir about faith and friendship

Editor’s note: As I said in launching this Substack, it is intended to be different from the many excellent Substack sites that follow current news or specific subject areas like energy, history, or culture. It is intended to feature long-form pieces of various kinds, and above all to be experimental.

One way of experimenting is to post up a draft paper or draft chapters of works in progress. Today’s 10,000 word offering requires some explanation. It is a chapter from a memoir I have been writing about my most intimate friend who died somewhat mysteriously eleven years ago. Kelly Clark was sufficiently famous nationally that he merited a half-page obituary in the New York Times, which you can read here.

Even after eleven years have passed I think about him every single day, and if I think about him too long I will inevitably tear up. I am not alone in this sentiment; his memory still runs very strong among a large number of people in Oregon, as I am reminded every time I make a visit. The memoir is not the style of writing I’ve ever done before, so this is experimental for me in more ways than one. I am tentatively calling it “And the Stars of Heaven Shall Fall,” which is from the Gospel of Mark, verse 13:25. The whole story arc is moving and tragic, and has a long way to go. I have written a complete first chapter, a prologue of sorts that attempts to set out the meaning of the whole story, but I am not happy with it and am not sure it is the best way to begin this project. So I am withholding it for the time being.

Here is chapter 2, which I wrote largely during my recent month-long stay over in Europe, in various coffee houses and bars where you can sit all day undisturbed. It starts at the very beginning, as any good chronology should.

—Steve

P.S. I can name the exact date of the photo immediately below. I snapped it on May 18, 1980, which was the day Mt. St. Helens erupted. We could see the plume of ash from 70 miles away.

Chapter 2: Education

“Nothing, I suspect, is more astonishing in any man’s life than the discovery that there do exist people very, very like himself.”

—C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy

“Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’”

—C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves

It is always best to begin at the beginning. Most friendships originate through chance and circumstance, but my friendship with Kelly Clark offers evidence splitting the difference between contingency and predestination, which is only the first of many paradoxes of this story.

We met belatedly as classmates at Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon, a smallish (2000 students) liberal arts college of the old style in our junior year in 1978. I had seen Kelly around campus, and I was certain I would not like him if we met. He was impossible to miss, with his pure blonde hair and preternatural handsomeness, as though he’d sprung straight from a glossy magazine ad for fine menswear. It was not a coincidence that he dressed very well, with his button-down shirts neatly tucked into sharp slacks, thereby setting himself conspicuously apart from the denim slovenliness typical of undergraduates, especially in crunchy, hempware-conscious Oregon, where the most common outerwear were the billowy down coats that Tom Wolfe remarked made its wearers “look like human hand grenades.” I made only the most perfunctory attempts at the student style that exploded in the 1980s as the preppy look. I would always read the back-to-campus fashion edition of Playboy every fall (because: articles), but never really followed through with their wardrobe dictates (because: expensive). So it was mostly blue jeans, pullover sports or polo shirts, and plain sweaters for me.

I first noticed Kelly across the room in one of the few large lecture classes at the college, a highly demanding physics course in the fall of 1978 that affected both our subsequent academic and professional pathways. At this still early point, Kelly thought he might want to be a doctor, and I thought maybe I wanted to be an engineer, like my father. The course was somewhat odd in that, although supposedly an introductory course, it focused exclusively on quantum theory, then as now the cutting edge of advanced physics. It was fascinating, but the math was extremely difficult, as my final grade, a C+, made evident. (It was the only C grade of my college years; I did considerably better at advanced algebra and applied calculus, though still not at A-level. This was, I hasten to add, before grade inflation had fully taken hold.) Meanwhile, I was getting straight A’s on my term papers in other courses, with a scattered A+ at times, which suggested my highest talent resided elsewhere than the hard sciences. Kelly reached the same conclusion from a similar result in the course.

Kelly was also in a smaller political theory seminar that I foolishly dropped after a bad start, though not before noticing that he had intelligent questions and thoughtful observations to offer in the classroom, sometimes momentarily giving pause to the professor with their originality. One rare sign: it was clear he had done the assigned reading carefully. His voice was striking; it was not especially deep, but it had a timbre that commanded your attention—an aspect of his natural charisma.

And we each turned up at a meeting of a fledgling chapter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, though coincidentally both of our college athletic careers—football for him, track and field for me—were over by this point because of knee problems. But there was still no reason to speak to him, let alone get to know him. This, for the worst of reasons on my part.

Think about it for a moment: most extremely handsome athletes—especially football players—are jerks. They get all the cheerleaders and generally lord it over everyone else.* Why should he be any different? (*This is an unjust and inaccurate stereotype on my part. I was privileged to have had several football players in my classes when I taught at UC Berkeley in later years—one of them drafted into the NFL—and they were all great students and splendid characters.)

First impressions, especially based on superficial prejudices, are often wrong, and this would not be the last time I made this mistake. What is said about book covers applies to people. “Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope,” Fitzgerald reminds us on the first page of Gatsby; “a sense of the fundamental decencies is parcelled out unequally at birth.”

Upon finally meeting—I’ll get to it presently—it took about three seconds to perceive my error; after three minutes of mounting astonishment, it became evident that he might be most interesting human being of my peer group I had ever met. After three hours—which is about how long we spent talking the first time we sat down together—we were best friends—I think they invented the shorthand “BFF” for us— and became practically inseparable. Only much later did it come into focus that we were at the time both gregarious loners in one way, knowing lots of people but in my case at least not especially close to any of them. If we hadn’t found each other, neither of us would have had many serious friends among our classmates. (Girlfriends—now that’s a different matter. . .)

There were still many good reasons why this friendship should never have come to fruition or lasted for the rest of our lives. We had very different tastes in just about everything. He was from Arkansas by way of Colorado and Arizona; I was from southern California. He liked country music; I liked obscure progressive rock (Gentle Giant, anyone?), though with few exceptions we seldom listened to or talked about popular music. We both liked classical music though, including one truly refined taste. During our senior year, and then in graduate education, we both started listening to Gregorian chant, often swapping LPs or passing along a tip for a new obscure LP one of us had rummaged up. Our political views diverged, though much more about that in due course. We were both alpha males of a sort, and two alphas usually don’t get along. But there were two compelling reasons why we bonded so intensely, and in the end they merge into just one—the real subject of this book.

And so how did a dramatic first encounter come about? It began with a peculiar and entirely typical provocation on my part. Sometime in the spring quarter of 1978, I posted a preposterous flyer on a few bulletin boards, and distributed directly to a small circle of friends, announcing a meeting for a new student discussion group. The subject: Radical Christianity!

Hoo boy! This title was meant ironically and mischievously, for I had not a subatomic particle’s worth of sympathy for the radical left. And herewith the first of two long background excursions is necessary.

This was not a prank, though it was intended as a gesture of contempt toward conventional self-righteous and self-satisfying campus radicalism, but also a mild statement of rebuke to smiley-faced evangelicalism of the 1970s. By this time I was already notorious in the pages of the college paper as a conservative, and instigator of frequent arguments with lefty students in the dining hall and anywhere else I could start trouble. In economics courses I would freely drop the f-bomb (Friedman—Milton, that is—this was the 1970s after all), along with the arguments of other renegade economists I was reading on my own. A liberal, Keynesian-oriented economics professor cited a statement from one of my student newspaper columns for a final exam essay question. I considered it the ultimate compliment, and Gus Mattersdorff (whose family were Holocaust survivors) later wrote the most fulsome recommendation for my graduate school applications. I’ll add that although he thought my opinions were thoroughly mistaken, he did send me a note praising one of my student newspaper columns as “the finest piece of undergraduate writing I have ever seen.” Alas I seem not to have kept this note.

I had first marked myself out as a controversialist early in my freshman year, when a major two-day symposium with the grandiose title “Eclipse of the Public” was held that required all classes to be cancelled, with the entire student body encouraged to attend. A symposium about the obstacles and problems of “the public interest” or the public good is perfectly sensible and fitting for a liberal arts college, but the spectrum of the symposium was narrow and uninspiring, with speakers that ranged from the left to the far-left. I can now recall only Philip Slater and Jessica Mitford, last of the famous Mitford sisters, from the lineup, Mitford complaining about morticians and the funeral industry as though it was a grand conspiracy on par with the munitions merchants said to have been responsible for World War I. Morticians are an obnoxious and exploitive cartel, to be sure, but hardly emblematic for competitive capitalism. But Mitford looked for any example to advance her obsession with becoming an undertaker of sorts herself. A sarcastic letter I sent to the editor of the student paper (“Eclipse of the Student?” I called it) decrying this one-sided state of affairs created a minor sensation, and launched my subsequent career as a columnist for the paper. I rose fast at the paper, becoming the editorial and opinion section editor my senior year, despite my well-known conservative opinions. And I can vividly recall the moment when the thought first crystalized that this might become my adult vocation. One day while changing in the locker room at the gym following a workout, I saw a student sitting on the bench reading my column that that week’s newspaper. When he finished, I was stunned when he pulled out a pair of scissors from his notebook, clipped the column, and placed it in a folder with, I could see, were my columns from previous weeks. I had a devoted reader! I did not know this student, and was so surprised and bashful that I didn’t introduce myself.

So what could “Radical Christianity” possibly mean? I had no certain idea, beyond a rejection of whatever the popular attitude was. “Radical” in our time has come to mean mostly extremism, whether of left or right (though usually left), or “transgression” against the conventional thoughts and practices of the moment. The radical leftism of the 1960s, 70s and after is in important aspects not radical at all; it is superficial, conventional, conformist, usually derivative from lightweight popularizers, and thoroughly destructive, though at that time nowhere near as bad as it is today. The precise definition of radical, from the Latin radix, means “getting at the root,” or “from the roots; going to the foundation or source of something; fundamental, basic.” Socrates was the original radical; so, too, are the Gospels, especially in a secular age that had corrupted much of theology. Liberal education rightly understood consists of radical questioning, and so should serious theology. My idea of “radical” was exactly the opposite of what everyone thought it meant, and I reveled in the deliberate confusion it generated. One thing that a faithful Christian understands innately is that nothing is more radical in our time then resisting the dogmatism that presumes that no dogma of any kind, from whatever source, is permissible. I was hoping to attract a few lefties perhaps, if only for the fun arguments we might have, but above all I just wanted to shake things up a bit, start some serious conversations, ask some fundamental questions. But above all, have some good college fun. And why should the self-styled campus “radicals” have the term all to themselves unchallenged?

Like a lot of student inspirations, I had no clear idea where it might go. Not that far, as it turned out, though we did have a number of follow-on meetings for the rest of the semester that started some of those good conversations, along the way producing two issues of a small student-written magazine (Isaiah’s Echoes, we called it), a half-day conference with guest speakers, and a few small good deeds. We decided as a group to fast one day a week in emulation of the early church fathers. We picked Wednesdays, which was highly convenient for me as it was the weekly layout day for the student newspaper, where I was a senior editor. In the pre-computer age layout required the slow and painstaking lick-and-stick method of placing Compugraphic typeset columns on a light board, slicing them up with an Exacto knife, and aligning them carefully on the gridlines. It was a very slow process, almost as bad as living with a pre-remote-control TV. The tight early evening deadline for finished pages—I was responsible for at least four pages a week—meant I had no time to eat anyway. Not exactly a sacrifice worthy of the desert fathers.

There was a proximate cause for this counter-intuitive “radical” venture. A forum at the college chapel had featured a lecture by the radical left feminist theologian Beverly Harrison. (Yes, I turned up for most visiting speakers of whatever orientation or reputation, being a glutton for punishment.) I never paid any attention to Harrison before or since, and would have ignored yet another stereotypical leftist visiting lecturer but for a single sentence in her remarks, which I was able to track down in my college notes I still have filed away: “Born again Christians are more concerned with their own well-being than with the concerns of society, which is a bad thing.”

Though I would surely have quarreled with the political orientation that generated Harrison’s comment, it was hard to reject the proposition entirely. I never read Gibson Winter’s 1961 book The Suburban Captivity of the Churches, but I liked the title, as it expressed an aspect of the self-satisfaction of 1970s-era evangelicalism especially of the new megachurches and celebrity pastors. It seemed at the time—still seems today—a Protestant assimilation to Enlightenment radical individualism. Where was the “fear and trembling” of working out the salvation advertised in the popular “I Found It!” bumper sticker campaign of the time? Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom in the Old Testament, but the evangelical God of the 1970s was advertised more often as your best buddy. At what point does the necessary introspection of a serious spiritual journey become self-absorption? I had only the slightest inkling at the time exactly what significant issues these undergraduate questions opened up. Only far into maturity did I recognize that what I was grasping after in embryonic or inchoate form was the theological-political problem—the relationship between the princes of this world and the Prince of the eternal. Beyond the individual question lies the unsolvable problem of working out what it means for a Christian to be in the world but not of it—of knowing how to “render unto Caesar what is Caeser’s and render unto God what is God’s.”

At the time of Harrison’s lecture I had been reading on my own the challenging work of the eclectic French theologian and sociologist Jacques Ellul. Ellul was another in a long line of idiosyncratic contemporary French thinkers who defy all of the usual American ideological categories. (Someone will need to explain to me another time why the French produce so many thinkers like Ellul, Claude LeFort, Raymond Aron, Pascal Bruckner, Pierre Manent, Bernard Henri-Levy, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, etc. whose thought is so orthogonal to both Anglo-American and German social and philosophic currents, and why their writing style is so much more raucous and discursive.) Ellul was popular on the New Left in the 1960s for his critical books on technology and propaganda, but his theological works were harmonious with conservative evangelicalism. Ellul wrote in The Presence of the Kingdom: “The Christian has not been created in order to separate himself from, or to live aloof from the world. . . Christians are not meant to live together in closed groups, refusing to mix with other people.”

This view clashes directly with Harrison’s aforementioned argument that “Born again Christians are more concerned with their own well-being than with the concerns of society, which is a bad thing.” Why, exactly, did Harrison think this was “a bad thing”? Within a year or two, with the arrival on the national scene of the Moral Majority and other new “religious right” groups, it became the conventional wisdom that American Christians ought to stay out of politics. Harrison’s position appeared contradictory. This, I thought, would be an excellent subject for an initial student group meeting.

I was surprised when among the 20 or so people who turned up in the chapel basement for the first meeting was Kelly, who had seen one of the flyers I had posted. I do not now recall a single thing said by me or anyone else at that first meeting, but I do have a strong recollection of the overwhelming impression Kelly made with his comments and observations at that meeting. It was he, more than anyone—more than me, who made the first meeting an enthusiastic success.

I don’t recall who proposed to the other that we retire to a cup of coffee when the meeting ended, though I strongly believe it was Kelly. Drinking coffee late into the night was, I soon learned, one of Kelly’s main modes of thought and action. I think we drove to a Denny’s, planted in a corner booth, and thereupon talked to midnight. It was the genesis of a great conversation that never ended. Kelly was, by turns, vigorous, thoughtful, imaginative, engaging. He had a mind like a cathedral—thick stoneworks; vaulted ceilings; his brightness refracted as by a stained rose window. He was a great conversationalist, and dialoguist. If we’d been ancient Greeks, we’d might have been Phaedrus and Pausanias staying up all night with Socrates in The Symposium. Henceforth our friendship was very much a Socratic dialogue, hindered by the defect that we had not Socrates to poke at our errors. “A friend is a second self,” Aristotle wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics; “so that our consciousness of a friend’s existence. . . makes us more fully conscious of our own existence.”

Proceeding from here requires the second background excursion.

*          *          *

It only became clear in retrospect many years later that Kelly and I were both overly serious students, though we didn’t really think we were different from our many bright and hardworking classmates. How serious? We got up to have breakfast before 8 am classes, and often met for breakfast even on days when we didn’t have morning classes. At most small residential colleges, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of students who turn up for breakfast in the nearly empty dining hall. And days that began with breakfast together often ended with late night conversation at a coffee shop off campus. It became routine to ask, at the end of breakfast, when we’d meet up later in the day, to continue whatever our newest subject was. Hard as it is to believe, for both of us the day couldn’t begin early enough, or last long enough, for the intellectual adventures we had in store.

Youth is wasted on the young, runs the old saying, but by degrees it has become evident to me that education is wasted on the young, too. The corollary advice I give every young person bound for college is, “don’t let college interfere with your education.” Partly this is a reflection on the desiccation of higher education in modern times, a theme I’ll mostly skip over here. In larger measure it means that the most important part of a college education occurs outside the classroom, after the lecture or seminar is over, on your own or with a circle of like-minded inquisitors who extend the classroom conversations. Most importantly, it is a reflection of something I didn’t perceive even as a college student: most students—perhaps the majority—go to college with the transparent mercenary purpose of acquiring a degree to enter a profession or enable the materially better life chances that college degrees are shown statistically to confer.

There’s nothing wrong with this, but it generates different dispositions among students. The bulk of such students approach their studies instrumentally rather than intellectually. Maybe this was not brand new to the 1970s. When asked in the early 1960s, “How many students are there at Ohio State?”, Harvey Mansfield, Sr. answered: “About one in a hundred.” In meeting Kelly, I knew I had spotted one.

One of the things Kelly and I discovered was that we both struck out for college with an entirely different and old-fashioned educational temperament: to explore the big questions and find better answers than we had at hand. We both wanted to be liberally educated individuals in the classical sense; both of us approached college as a supreme intellectual adventure. If we had been born German, we’d have fallen into the category of junger ernster Mann.

Does anyone still go to college for a liberal education, in the classical, soul-completing meaning of that term? The current statistics suggest not: the proportion of majors in the humanities, and the social sciences as well, has plummeted from nearly a quarter in the 1960s to the single digits today, even at elite universities like Harvard and Yale. And recurrent recent surveys find that a significant plurality of graduates in the liberal arts and social sciences regret their major.  

Universities today, as Yale’s Anthony Kronman has written trenchantly, no longer ask the big questions—starting with “what is the meaning of life?”—or offer even the outline of the possible answers. But big questions and difficult answers were what Kelly and I both wanted most from the leisure—recall that the word school means leisure—that undergraduate education is intended to provide. One thing distinguishes the disposition of the seriously inquisitive student is that he or she not only does the assigned reading, but usually seeks out additional reading. I never for a moment lost sight of the extraordinary luxury of being able to read books and engage in extended thought and conversation about as many subjects as I could cram into four years. The library was my happy place, and Kelly’s too. Throughout my undergraduate years I often walked the stacks in the library (“walk the stacks” is a phrase entirely unknown to the current generation of college students), checking out books not on any course reading list, and puzzling over periodicals I’d pick up at random. A typical trip to check out a book needed for a term paper usually involved checking out three or four more books serendipitously discovered adjacent on the shelf. I ended up subscribing to several academic and serious intellectual quarterlies as an undergraduate that I first encountered wandering the periodical stacks (including Encounter).

A further word needs saying here about the state of liberal arts education in the 1970s. Like most colleges yielding to the derangements of the 1960s, Lewis and Clark had discarded a core curriculum. There was no longer a Western Civilization requirement of any kind, or any common body of knowledge that this “liberals arts” college thought all educated students should confront in order to be “liberally educated.” The college has since reinstated a core curriculum, though like most colleges that today boast of a “core,” it is a far cry from the cores of old for all of the usual reasons. (In a sentence, it might he said that if the problem with K-12 education is Common Core, the problem with higher education is Hollow Core.) And the faculty in those days was a mixed bag. There were a handful of excellent and inspiring professors, but an equal number of marginal and even mediocre professors, some with only master’s degrees, which is unheard of among tenured faculty today. This was not unusual for late career faculty at small liberal arts colleges in the 1970s; many had been hired back in the 1950s, when in the midst of the rapid postwar expansion of higher education there was actually a shortage of college professors that lasted well into the 1960s, forcing many fast-growing small colleges to hire anyone minimally qualified. This circumstance must seem bizarre to the army of discouraged graduate students and underpaid adjunct professors without prospects in today’s oversupplied academic market. But here’s the thing: some of these “lesser qualified” professors were superior teachers and more interesting intellects than the more conventionally qualified recent Ph.Ds. Today’s faculty at L&C, and nearly all other liberal arts colleges, is vastly superior on paper, in terms of degrees from prestigious graduate programs and publication records in leading academic journals, but it is not clear that this is a true improvement in educational quality. An argument for another time and place.

But if the college was entirely typical of liberal arts dis-education of the time, it had many other charms and assets. Like me Kelly was drawn to the Pacific Northwest, and to a smaller liberal arts college where one might find a more engaging intellectual experience than is available in the large lecture hall format of Behemoth University. The college traced its roots back to the 19^th century, and had been known as Albany College on account of its original location in Albany, Oregon, south of Salem. But in the 1940s it moved to its present location in Portland, and the board of trustees renamed it Lewis & Clark College as a “’symbol of the pioneering spirit that had made and maintained the College,’ thereby grounding the future of the institution in a heritage of exploration and discovery.” They wouldn’t name it Lewis and Clark today, because of the current fad of repudiating the early American westward expansion that is uniformly regarded on campuses today as exploitive, oppressive, “settler colonialism,” and genocidal. There has been the usual woke agitation against the name, and demands that the college to jettison its team name—“Pioneers”—though this has been resisted so far.

In those days there were no U.S. News and World Report rankings of colleges (which are a travesty in any case, with a baleful homogenizing effect on higher education); L & C was usually described as “very selective” in college admissions guides at the time. We both chose the college for a mix of serious and idiosyncratic reasons. I wanted to attend a small liberal arts college rather than what Russell Kirk liked to call “Behemoth University,” with its large lecture hall format and remote student contact with faculty. (L&C had about 2,000 undergraduates in the mid-1970s, to which was attached a couple of professional graduate Masters programs and a well-regarded law school.)

Lewis and Clark is routinely included on Internet click-bait lists of the most beautiful college campuses in the nation, and rightly so. The leafy campus is nestled among tall Douglas Firs, Western Hemlock, and Sitka Spruce evergreens on the southwestern bank of the Willamette River, on the site of the grand Tudor-style estate of Lloyd Frank, known fittingly a “Fir Acres.” Frank was co-founder of the Meier and Frank department store chain once prominent in the Northwest, long since absorbed by Macy’s. His son Gerry Frank was the long-time confidante and chief of staff to Senator Mark Hatfield throughout Hatfield’s long political career, and someone Kelly came to know well in the fullness of time. The campus features a spectacular view of a distant Mt. Hood on clear days—but there aren’t that many of those in rainy Portland. The dense evergreen canopy throughout the campus meant that even a cloudy or rainy day was never visually gray or dull. As strange as it may sound, as a native of arid southern California, the legendary wet weather of the Pacific Northwest was one of the chief attractions of L & C, because I thought it would reinforce my duty to spend more time studying. I was right about this, as it turned out.

An old cobblestone road from the glory days of the manor house wound down through campus, and in one of my many eccentricities I made a point of finding a parking place at the end of the cobbled road, even though it was a longer walk to my dorm than regular parking. On sunny spring days, everyone was outside. I often found a patch of grass in the sun below the manor house, next to the long reflecting pond that stretched out below and facing east toward Mt. Hood, there to read for hours while ignoring my growing sunburn. College life as it should be.

As mentioned above, the present campus dates back to the 1940s; its mid-1970s architecture was a combination of ghastly modernist classrooms and tiny faculty offices along with drab brick dormitories and a giant centrally located student center and dining hall, though the campus has been almost entirely rebuilt in recent years. My favorite classroom space was the attic seminar room in the top floor of the old manor house, with a sloped ceiling and gabled windows, accessed through a steep, narrow (and non-ADA compliant) stairway. It came closest in my imagination to the Oxford tutor’s paneled rooms, though the professor for my first class in that space was a philosophy seminar led by a jeans and t-shirt wearing deep-dive Marxist who rolled and lit up his own tobacco cigarettes in class. (Those were the days you could still smoke in class and in dormitories.) Otherwise most classrooms reminded of the drab spaces of the typical high school. That Marxist professor, by the way, was an excellent classroom teacher of philosophy, a demonstration that ideology needn’t degrade an intellectual environment if the subject matter and material are presented straight, and not shoehorned into some current ideological fad.

Finally, Lewis and Clark was also an NAIA (National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics) Division II school, which meant I could conceivably compete in cross country and track, as I wasn’t good enough for an NCAA Division I school. Two years of struggling at the 3,000-meter steeplechase finally disabused me that any athletic glory was in prospect, and by my junior year my growing work on the school paper became too time consuming to allow for distance training and classwork. Kelly had a similar story; after a brilliant high school football career as a quarterback in the heyday of the triple-option offense Kelly was highly recruited by several premier college football programs for his raw speed, quickness, and competitiveness. But knee injuries requiring surgery foreclosed future gridiron glory. His brief thought of a comeback ended when he saw the completely gonzo run-and-shoot offense that the L&C football team ran, which seemed guaranteed to end with further knee damage or worse. Books it was instead, which suited him better anyway.

What was a small liberal arts college in Oregon like in those days? In the mid-1970s there could still be found a small residue of the agitated 1960s campus atmosphere, chiefly in the handful of late 20-something Vietnam veterans whose maturity invariably leavened the classroom experience. It was my first inkling of the way maturity and real-world experience geometrically improves educational capacity.

The student body, like most private colleges then, was overwhelming white and mostly upper-middle class or upper class, with very few minorities except for the handful of African athletes recruited for sports, and usually the products of good preparatory schooling in Uganda, Zimbabwe, or Kenya. There were also a number of Saudis and Iranians (this was before the Khomeini revolution of 1979), including one member of the Saudi royal family who in recent years has been under house arrest by current Saudi ruler Mohammed bin-Salman. Needless to say these were cash-paying customers and a revenue model for many American colleges at the time, a role filled today by cash-paying Chinese students. The college drew mostly from the West Coast and Rocky Mountain states, but had a non-trivial number of students from eastern and southern states. There were also a notable number of students from Hawaii (some of them prep school classmates of Barry Obama, as it later turned out), eager to escape the claustrophobia of island living.

All-in tuition and board in the mid-1970s was slightly more than $5,000, and there were a substantial number of students working their way through college with work-study and full-time summer employment. Today’s tuition and fees are above $65,000, and therefore not feasible for a pay-as-you-go student. Like every college today, the current student body is more “diverse” on the superficial level of demographics, but I think the student body of the mid-1970s was arguably more “diverse” and “inclusive” in terms of the mix of students by family and K-12 educational background. Among other things, I was started to see students unable to handle college-level work, flunking their classes and dropping out halfway through their freshman year. I doubt this happens much today.

Today Portland is known as a hotbed of “progressivism,” and has basked in its reputation as a “hip” city for millennials. One unofficial slogan is that Portland is “where young people go to retire,” and “Portlandia” on [check TV listing] can be regarded as a documentary as much as a satire. Oregon was decidedly “crunchy” already in the 1970s, where the most common outerwear was the billowy down parka that Tom Wolfe remarked made its wearers “look like human hand grenades.” (Neither Kelly nor I owned one.) Strangely, for such a wet locale, almost no one ever used an umbrella. I didn’t own one during my four years. It was culturally distinct in another way. The campus, in contrast to other campuses I’d occasional visit to see friends, almost wholly eschewed the disco and new wave craze, of the late 1970s, except to make fun of it. Instead the modal musical taste ran to the Grateful Dead, progressive rock, and country.

For students attending college for professional preparation, or merely to gain the ordinary benefits a college degree conferred back in those days, it may not have mattered much that liberal education was in its death throes. While Kelly and I both wanted a lot of liberal learning from our education, as previously hinted what we learned was that the best real education turns out to be self-education. Only later did we discover this crucial trait in the self-educations of Lincoln and Churchill.  You could find some of the classic authors and big ideas in the corners of the curriculum if you knew where to look, and when we found a professor of real insight and ability, we grabbed on as firmly as a limpet to a ship’s hull. But in the main our most important reading and thinking was done outside the classroom, with our own self-selected reading list and topics, a habit that lasted well after graduation.  We conducted our own two-person classroom. I can’t remember very many of the books assigned for my classes, but will never forget the excitement of discovering, and devouring, great and challenging thinkers on my own. A reference to Arthur Koestler sent me to the library to find first Darkness at Noon, and then Koestler’s non-fiction. The Yogi and the Commissar kept me up all night the instant I discovered it. Over one spring break skiing with friends I kept nearly falling asleep on the ski lifts during the day because I was up all night reading Whittaker Chambers Witness. On my own I tackled Nietzsche, Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill, sociologists Peter Berger and Robert Nisbet, and G.K. Chesterton. There were a few blunders; why did I waste any time with Theodore Roszak? And why did I allow another of my economics professors talk me out of reading Keynes’ General Theory of Unemployment on my own?  

I subscribed to The Public Interest, and began following the “neoconservatives,” especially Irving Kristol and James Q. Wilson. These seemed like serious, lively minds. Kelly and I both read and swapped books by Christian authors, especially Dietrich Bonhoeffer, John Stott, Os Guiness, Michael Novak, Thomas Merton, Karl Barth, and Henri Nouwen. And when we spent a semester together in Washington DC, we couldn’t put down or shut up about The Federalist Papers.

There was a second element to this shared educational quest: as is already obvious, we were both evangelical Christians. But as with our education, we weren’t quite happy with either the state of evangelicalism or the quality of the campus Christian fellowships, which we only sporadically attended. We were both attuned to C.S. Lewis’s similar discomfort in Surprised by Joy: “But though I liked clergymen as I liked bears, I had as little wish to be in the Church as in the zoo. It was, to begin with, a kind of collective; a wearisome ‘get-together’ affair.”

There was a similarity between the hollowed-out core of liberal education and the simplified core of evangelicalism in the 1970s. Fifteen years later we would embrace Mark Noll’s Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (“The scandal of the evangelical mind is that there is not much of an evangelical mind”). But for now we were on our own. Although evangelical Christianity was enjoying a revival in the 1970s, there was a certain lightness of being about it; not just the TV hucksters but too many of the new celebrity preachers of the early megachurches seemed to be making faith all about achieving an earthly personal happiness. “God has a plan for your life!” Maybe, but I note that His plan for Christians at one point included hungry lions and living in catacombs. And while I admired martyrs, I had little interest in joining their ranks. Churchill’s great phrase about disarmament applied to our discontent with this style of evangelicalism: “Too easy to be good,” though at that time we latched on to Bonhoeffer’s phrase about “cheap grace.” There seemed to be little appreciation of paradox, tragedy, or suffering—except the suffering of Christ on the cross, so you didn’t ever have to—or the radical contingency of life even on a long faith journey. 

This is probably one reason why neither of us wanted to attend an evangelical college; we both wanted to confront first-hand the dilemmas of faith in a secular world. It turns out that having a serious Christian faith better equips you to take advantage of a secular education, for a very simple reason. A student of serious Christian faith will instinctively reject today’s pervasive but ultimately unserious subjectivist view that all ideas or all thought are captive to the present time—that it is impossible to see beyond one’s immediate horizon, a self-imposed straightjacket that is known alternately as historicism or “presentism.” C.S. Lewis wrote in his autobiography Surprised by Joy of his attempt at an intellectual “New Look” that included a rejection of “chronological snobbery”—“the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever had gone out of date is on that account discredited.” It was the first step on Lewis’s road to Christian faith. It will also be the key to having the genuine openness that a real liberal arts education aspires to be: openness to the truth or error of all ideas rather than beginning with the presumptuous contempt for the experience and thought of prior ages. I still recall my shock at the first time a fellow student sitting at the same table in the dining hall dismissed a quotation I offered from a writer from the 1950s because “that’s from such a long time ago!” (Somehow, the following school year, we briefly ended up roommates anyway.)

Only later did we recognize that we were rehearsing Tertullian’s ancient question: what hath Athens to do with Jerusalem? It took us both many years to realize that what we really sought was the synthesis of Roman Catholicism or at least central aspects of the older orthodoxy, though neither of us ever became Catholics. We were both steeped in the canon of C.S. Lewis. In my case, Lewis’s Abolition of Man, which I read in high school, made an enormous impression, and served as an inoculation against the lazy and stifling historicist or nihilist premises of so much of higher education and modern thought today. Likewise I had read most of Francis Schaeffer’s books in high school—books that are both deeply flawed in their analysis but largely correct in their underlying logic and moral conclusions. (The novelist and critic D. Keith Mano offered the best single sentence description of Schaeffer’s approach: “He goes out after an idea as the Army Corps of Engineers would go after a dam.”) Schaeffer and Lewis were responsible for what intellectual seriousness could be found in evangelicalism in those days. Both Lewis and Schaeffer were a useful prologue to my later encounters with the work of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin, Harry Jaffa, Alasdair MacIntyre, and many lesser-known authors. 

But in the end it was our mutual interest in the intersection of politics and faith that provided the crossroads for our educational and theological cravings. Not that we held an identical political outlook. We didn’t. I was “a conservative by cell structure,” as Whittaker Chambers once put it. I started reading National Review in the 8^th grade, after becoming riveted by watching William F. Buckley on TV, and deliberately annoyed my high school teachers with Buckley’s rarified vocabulary. (“Well that’s certainly precocious!,” Buckley said to me when I related this the first time I met him.) Kelly always got a chuckle when I’d collect the latest issue of NR from my campus mailbox, clutch it to my chest with mock relief, and exclaim, “Ah—my blue-bordered oasis from campus liberalism!” If National Review was my Sunday church so to speak, the American Spectator became my Saturday night tavern, and its irreverent style became the model for my adventures in college newspaper journalism.

Even though I’ve made my living largely as a writer and have published several critically acclaimed books, Kelly was by far the better writer, with a greater range of emotion and skill, as you’ll see later on. I liked the rococo, subordinate-clause cadences and multi-syllables of Buckley and Chambers (I got over it eventually), and the modernist verse of T.S. Eliot. Kelly liked direct and simple prose for the most part, and he preferred the more straightforward poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Emily Dickenson, and he also liked Chesterton’s rather orthodox (in both senses of the term) verse. An exception was the semi-modernist verse of Thomas Merton, which sounds like Eliot sometimes. Kelly had a favorite Merton verse, from “Elegy to a Young Prophet.”

Keep away, son, these lakes are salt. These flowers

Eat insects. Here private lunatics

Yell and skip in a very dry country.

Kelly would read that passage aloud, and we’d stare in dumbfounded silence, not sure just what to make of it.

Kelly was mostly a liberal then, and read the deeply radical Sojourners magazine. I say “mostly” a liberal because in decisive respects he wasn’t. While I idolized Buckley and a new young columnist named George Will, the political figure Kelly admired most was Oregon’s maverick Republican Senator Mark Hatfield, who was a liberal on some issues (especially defense and foreign policy), but deeply conservative on others, chiefly on account of his deep Christian faith. Kelly held a reverential gaze for Hatfield that, I used to kid him, should be reserved only for Bill Buckley. Our senior year was 1980. Ronald Reagan appalled him at the time; coming from California I was a deep-dish Reaganite even then. That difference of opinion was unimportant to our friendship.

We seldom argued about current issues—at least not in the usual way.  Underneath our issue-by-issue differences was a solid shared foundation. When we did disagree, our inquiry usually turned immediately to discovering what key questions needed to be asked to reach a considered judgment, and what we needed to know to answer those questions. In other words, always the first things. We took to heart something John Stott counseled in his fine book Christ the Controversialist: “Certainly every right-minded person finds controversy distasteful, and we should studiously avoid argument for argument’s sake. . . To relish controversy is to have a ‘morbid craving,’ a form of spiritual sickness.” But a tolerant spirit, Stott went on to say, is not the same thing as a tolerant mind, and nothing was more typical of Jesus than His continuous debates with the religious leaders of His time. Sorting out and trying to live this distinction became our shared purpose.

Kelly’s Christian faith instinctively inclined him against the lazy historicism and easy nihilism of the time. We pronounced “nihilism” differently: Kelly insisted on “KNEE-hill-ism,” while I preferred the more common “NYE-hill-ism.” We never resolved this difference, and I never ceased mocking his pronunciation. Although generally liberal in his political outlook at this time, he didn’t feel much in common with the generic liberalism of most of our fellow students. He had strong pacifist inclinations, but recoiled from the superficiality of the anti-war movement that had passed down from the 1960s. In particular he abhorred abortion, just then coming into focus as an incendiary social issue. Over the long run, we usually arrived at the same place in our thought about a subject, independent of one another and with different thought processes that proved complementary. And when we disagreed it was usually within a context of agreeing on the central questions that needed answering.

What united us over the fullness of time despite many particular differences was the shared understanding that political salvation—the bane of radical and utopian ideologies—was entirely wrongheaded, though Kelly did attempt a political theory paper on the political philosophy of Jesus. Neither of us had yet read Federalist 51—“If men were angels. . .”—nor confronted Augustine’s City of God. But we had somehow stumbled into an Augustinian frame of mind entirely on our own. Is there anything redeeming about politics? Can politics be redeemed in any meaningful way? I don’t mean “redemptive politics” in any of the senses revolutionaries always have used and abused the idea. We weren’t searching for “political religion.” In fact we were trying deliberately to avoid politicized religion, whether of the left, right, or mushy middle.

Despite his flirtation with the Christian radicalism of Sojourners magazine, which he took up initially because it was a favorite of Mark Hatfield and much of Hatfield’s staff, Kelly was instinctively a small-c conservative for the simple reason that the Bible is clear in its rejection of the earthly utopianism that is the destination of all leftist enthusiasms. “Put not your trust in princes, nor in the son of man, in whom there is no help,” Psalm 146 instructs. The New Testament counsel is more indirect, such as Matthew 6:33: “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be added to you.” For Kelly, practical political with a Christian orientation depended on contemplation more than ratiocination; he was monastic (literally in later years) rather than Scholastic. He was more inclined to Thomas á Kempis than Thomas Aquinas. My disposition ran to the latter.

But the current examples of trying to stay above or beside the fray didn’t impress us. While we respected Billy Graham, we didn’t find him compelling. Closer to our sensibilities was the counsel of warning from Jacques Ellul: “Politics is the church’s worst problem. It is her constant temptation, the occasion of her greatest disasters, the trap continually set for her by the prince of this world.” In the fullness of time this question would turn out to be as deeply personal for Kelly as it was theological.

We did, however, share the view that politics was about more than institutional design or simply deciding who got how much, which largely drained political life of its moral dimension and much of its human drama. Above all, we understood that the central variation of the question we were asking is: Can you be involved in political life without losing your soul? It was already quite obvious to us, even at a young age, that for too many people political ambition displaced salvation as the motive principle of their souls, exacting a degrading price to both politics and their souls.

Kelly’s seriousness about this dominating question can be understood by the fact that at the time, he was undecided whether, after taking his bachelor’s degree, he should go to law school as preparation to become a politician, or go to seminary and study theology in order to become a clergyman—and perhaps a politician later. Part of the choice turned on the substance of what could be learned from either path, and partly by which career path he could have the larger impact on the world. (Eventually, as we shall see, his ultimate answer was: Both.) The choice between law or theology is not as disparate as it might seem. Quite the opposite, in fact. I wanted to be a writer of some kind, and what bonded our separate ambitions was the fact that each of us felt a calling that required constant thinking.

For the time being we studied political things together. I recall in particular one spring afternoon when we attended an extracurricular showing of a PBS documentary about the passage of the Clean Air Act of 1977, hosted by the political science department. The film was long and slow, filled with the arcane details of how the House Rules Committee worked, the byzantine markup process of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the behind the scenes lobbying of industry and interest groups, the posturing and maneuvering of politicians, and the inevitable confusing and unsatisfying compromises of the final legislation. I remember that most of the students in the small audience found it plodding and boring, and rightly so in the ordinary sense. Kelly and I found it riveting, and left the screening room excitedly jabbering away. Among other things about that particular story is that the fault lines weren’t Republican against Democrat, or left against right; the Clean Air Act of 1977 was mostly an intramural fight between Democratic Party factions and interests (The whole story was later analyzed superbly in Bruce Ackerman’s Clean Coal, Dirty Air.) The spectacle of people in the same party fighting one another was our first lesson that the real world of politics differed considerably from what you read in textbooks—or the newspapers.

This kind of exuberance never left us despite becoming supposedly mature adults. Many years later I recall ringing up Kelly on the phone in a state of high excitement over discovering the climax of Max Weber’s famous lecture “Politics as a Vocation,” and the illumination of Churchill’s teaching about the Munich crisis I was able to make out of it. Other times our communications were about more simple, straightforward matters, but with no less enthusiasm about our interest in it. “Who the hell is Sarah Palin and why have I never heard of her?”, he said over the phone to me on that famous July afternoon in 2008.

But in the meantime, we were still intellectual greenhorns. The fall of 1979 found us together for the quarter in Lewis and Clark’s Washington DC program, where we were inseparable. In those days the program was unlike most university DC semester programs that plant students in dreary internships on Capitol Hill or with an advocacy group, answering mail, stuffing envelopes, and photocopying documents—or today, doing internet searches and social media postings. Lewis and Clark instead held regular courses, including art history, supplemented by visits with DC potentates of various kinds: Senators and House members, Capitol Hill staff, White House staff, senior military officers in the Pentagon, journalists, lobbyists, K Street lawyers, trade association executives, military officers, academics, and think tank scholars. (One of these site visits introduced me to the American Enterprise Institute, my subsequent employer 20 years later.) We were, like many engaged students, overly earnest and serious.

I can recall one particular session with the head of a major news organization only because for some reason I kept the note Kelly passed to me during a presentation so dreadful that it was hard to stay awake: “I can’t believe this guy is the president of a major news organization and lectures as poorly as he does. . . One thing we need to do in our undergraduate program if we’re going to train top executives is teach them how to give a talk.” This was only one of many lessons we took to heart that we never could have learned in a classroom. And more on this specific lesson later on.

* * *

If this story was only about an intellectual quest, it wouldn’t be worth telling, or at least not for a long time. The eagerness of our minds at the time I now regard as our puppy dog phase. We didn’t know anything, though we knew we didn’t know anything, except that we should indulge our exuberance.

But no one lives by the mind alone. The personal lives of our friendship are what make it poignant and tragic.

One the personal level, two things were immediately evident about Kelly. First, he liked girls, and girls really liked him on account of his stunning good looks. I was tempted to wonder if people observing our inseparability on campus might wonder if we were gay, but in fact we were both raging heterosexuals. I dated actively throughout all four years of college—something that apparently college age kids today have ceased to do, even with the help (or hindrance really) of Tinder. Kelly always had a girlfriend, but usually at a distance, back home in Colorado or Texas or somewhere, and never on campus. Someone he’d met over the summer, usually through his summer job as a mountain guide for Young Life in British Columbia. He described his ideal type at the time: Julie Christie in Dr. Zhivago. The man had taste.

Kelly admitted that he had been sexually active as a teenager, but after acquiring his Christian faith he attempted to live a life of virtue, that is, restraint if not celibacy. One morning early in our friendship I could tell by his demeanor that something was wrong. He was clearly upset and downcast about something. So I asked. Not for the first time, an exceptionally pretty coed had thrown herself at him, and he was unable to resist. “I even left the engine running in my car in the driveway when I drove her home from the library, but I couldn’t resist.” Of course, readers could speculate, as I did, that the initial decision to drive a lady home from the library suggests some ambivalence or welcome temptation about the circumstances, but it was likely raining and chivalry is not a bad excuse. But it was undeniable that he felt guilt and chagrin at failing a basic Christian duty. And it was not the only recent instance. Many more tumbled out over time.

I didn’t think to ask why he didn’t settle on one of these young beauties as a steady, and in fact he did have a couple of close ladyfriends from among our fellow students who almost became a real relationship, but I now think Kelly had what the psychobabblists call “commitment issues.” At the very least he was conflicted.

While still in college the one experience we never shared was having a drink, either on campus or off. I was a moderate college drinker, and never a hard core “partier” or binge drinker too typical of college men. I did enjoy lots of beer on weekends, but also a lot of red wine. Having grown up part time in California’s central coast wine country, I had a fondness for good red wine already, and brought a case of Zinfandel with me to help launch my sophomore year. Whisky and gin were still in my future.

Kelly didn’t drink at all—at least not then. Hoping to exploit his popularity with women, I was always disappointed that I couldn’t persuade him to go out for a beer. The wingman potential was staggering in my view, as I seemed intuitively to understand the “Nash Equilibrium” hypothesis as it played out in flirt-world illustrated later in A Beautiful Mind. In later years after college, on the relatively rare occasions we went to a bar together, ladies would send him drinks. He was married by this time, and would ask the server to convey his thanks to the sender, along with the message “I noticed he had a wedding ring.” My reaction was, as it had been in college, “can I please have your castoffs?”

This leads to the second aspect of Kelly’s personal life I learned early, and would take on central importance years later. And it was a real-life example of the famous opening to Anna Karenina: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Both of us came from families and households that can be considered upper-middle class, or lower-upper class depending on which definitions of income or class traits you want to use. Our impressive fathers were similar: both World War II combat veterans, and successful entrepreneurs. Needless to say both of us had materially comfortable early childhoods. We never talked about our childhoods very much, probably a natural attribute of males in transition from adolescence to maturity. Everything is relentlessly forward-looking at that point, and all introspection settles on the immediate.

But there was one significant difference in our family lives: Kelly’s parents divorced when he was in high school, and Kelly moved with his brother and sister and his mother to Colorado Springs (in part because the dry mountain air was the best remedy for Kelly’s increasingly severe pollen allergies), where Kelly finished high school. One reason for his parents’ divorce was his mother’s desperate, near life-long struggle with alcoholism. His mother was a lovely person with a saintly disposition—when she was sober. In fact you could say she came by her saintliness precisely because of her struggle.

On another early day in our friendship I found Kelly once again in obvious distress first thing in the morning—so much so that he didn’t even seem to be present at all. I first wondered if he had once again succumbed to female wiles. No: it was much worse. Back in Colorado Springs, his mother had gone missing—the result of her latest bender. Even though Kelly was a thousand miles away and could do nothing directly, it took a lot of his time in addition to the toll on his well-being, making frantic phone calls seeking help and information. This happened with discouraging frequency, and his mother was often found passed out or disoriented on the street somewhere a day or two later. It became an almost regular occurrence over the next year, with a day beginning, “Mom is missing again.” How many heart-sinking moments can anyone go through? I felt less that useless with each instance. Now I understood why he wasn’t keen to go out for a drink, and I never asked him again during our college years.

Like many alcoholics, his mother was both stubborn and proud, resisting rehab or other interventions. And indeed she could maintain abstinence on her own willpower for a while. The dread feeling that it was only a matter of time before another episode occurred was always in the front of Kelly’s mind. His mother ultimately conquered her addiction, and settled into the beneficent role of beloved grandmother—maybe it was because she became a grandmother that she summoned sufficient inner strength at last. (A stray fond memory: I once enjoyed from her kitchen the greatest batch of homemade fried chicken in my life. For the rest of her days she never let me forget how much of it I ate. The quantity was, to quote the classic moment from The Quiet Man where Barry Fitzgerald’s character says of John Wayne’s romantic conquest of Maureen O’Hara: “impetuous. . . Homeric!”)

His mother’s struggle and agony should have been an early warning as we shall see, though it is the kind of thing a young adult without direct exposure to such things often doesn’t perceive. At least I didn’t. I can see things more clearly now, though not easily, or without pangs of guilt. Already, in the first days of our friendship, I could see that this brilliant and charismatic person had personal demons. The point of this chapter and story so far is that, as I think of it now, we both shared the same daemon, in the classical Greek sense of a semi-divine inspiration or obsessive genius (and the root of Eudaimonia, or happiness), the pagan version of Christian calling or even Grace.

But there is only a one-letter difference between daemon and demon.