His passing was not just the end of a great man but the end of an era — and the start of a new one.
I did not expect it to happen, watching the flag-draped casket carrying the husk of Justice Antonin Scalia up the long marble steps of the Supreme Court this morning, but I wept.
I did not know Justice Scalia except slightly, and I do not cry easily or often.
Something inside me was stirred by the simple things. How ponderous the casket was, carried by those eight strong men slowly up the steps — the simple, heavy physicality of death we too often cover up and elide.
Then there was the sudden access to the ceremonious, to the symbolic — how rare that is in contemporary life: “How but in custom and in ceremony / Are innocence and beauty born?” Yeats asked.
Hearing the news anchors fall silent for once, out of respect to the moment, was part of it: We in the chattering class chatter and fight and bicker incessantly. How seldom we rise above it in postmodern American life. I am so hungry, like so many others, for what I can still remember as the norm in American life: the time when we recognized, together, that there are things bigger than politics, bigger than the things that divide us, and at moments like this.
In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned
Hearts are not had as a gift but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful
I watched Ginny Thomas and then her husband, Justice Clarence Thomas, wipe their eyes. I saw Justice Ginsburg stand in silent sentinel and remind us of the friendship that has touched so many, stirred indeed the artist’s soul. Justice Scalia is an icon of judicial principle, yes, but he is also the only Supreme Court justice to inspire both an opera and a play, each pointing to friendship, a love of the human other that cannot be reduced to a principle and that points to something larger than our positions:
My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief . . .
An intellectual hatred is the worst.
The short, dignified, to-the-point prayers offered by his son, Father Paul Scalia, testified to the mercy of Jesus Christ, to the idea that there is an end to our struggles, a place of rest, a yoke that is light, above all a place beyond the mire we can see, in which we appear to be stuck.
I watched Ginny Thomas weep, and then her husband Clarence Thomas tear up and suddenly, unexpectedly, I wept out loud and alone, not for a principle but for a man, for a man in full, for a life so well-lived.
Ed Whelan told CNN that Justice Scalia raised his nine children “old school,” expecting them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and do well, which they have done.
VIDEO: Charles Cooke Pays Tribute to Justice Scalia
Think about that for a moment: Antonin Scalia and his wife raised nine children on a Supreme Court justice’s salary, which was $104,000 when Scalia joined the court in 1986 — a healthy sum compared with that of the average family, as Depression-baby Scalia surely never forgot, but just as surely unimaginable to most of the hustling and bustling Washington elite.
And anytime someone complimented one of his children, Justice Scalia said, “Maureen gets all the credit.” That would be the former Miss Maureen McCarthy, his wife of 55 years, the wife of his youth whom he loved and cherished until death last week parted them, for a little while. But death, they both knew, does not have the final word.
#share#Jeffrey Toobin pointed out that he, like most of the legal community in Washington, has never seen an oral argument without Justice Scalia being there on the bench. You could tell it was an important case when Maureen Scalia was in the audience.
I cried in this pause in our endless bickering, our deeply important divisions, to celebrate a life lived both fully and well, a great justice, a lover of the arts, including the art of friendship, a loving husband and father, a genuinely and deeply good man. Surely that is a cause for rejoicing, not tears?
Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is Heaven’s will;
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
CNN’s presidential historian, Douglas Brinkley, pointed out that Antonin Scalia was more than a great justice, he was a conservative icon, one of the four greats of the conservative movement: Barry Goldwater, a libertarian John the Baptist who paved the way for the great Ronald Reagan; William F. Buckley Jr., another life lived con brio; and now Justice Antonin Scalia, the last of these giants, has left us.
Our fathers have passed. It’s our turn.
And suddenly realizing this, suddenly bereft, I wept unashamedly and without reserve — not for Antonin Scalia (gathered surely to his reward) but for us: Are we up to the task Justice Scalia and our fathers have left behind?