I try in my new book to convey the way Ronald Reagan seemed to me to embody a kind of living proof of the existence of free will. Freud said all that mattered about us was our sexual impulses, Marx that we were all tossed about by large, abstract forces, which were themelves unfolding according to predetermined patterns. Yet Reagan stood up to history itself.

This seems to have struck a chord. Here are a couple of emails too good to keep to myself.

From one reader:

I was struck by a quote in Mike Potemra’s review of your book in NRODT. He refers to your quoting of Rev. Lorenzo Albacete:
“We all have to take reality as it comes to us–presidents popes, all of us. [The question is] what you choose to do with reality.” I was immediately struck by the close similarity to lines from The Lord of The Rings, spoken by Gandalf to Frodo:
FRODO: I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had ever happened.
GANDALF: So do all that come to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
That Tolkien was a devout…Christian is not unrelated….I thought the many Corner readers who are also Lord of the Rings fans would appreciate the heads up.

And from another:

I had to pause…for a moment [while reading your book] to pull out my old copy of Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Here’s an excerpt:
“Individuals who depart from the norms – heroes, saints, sages, artists, and poets, as well as madmen and criminals – look for different things in life than most others do. The existence of people like these shows that consciousness can be ordered in terms of different goals and intentions. Each of us has this freedom to control our subjective reality.”

Reagan, Tolkien, Csikszentmihalyi. You could hardly ask for more disparate ways of grasping it, but all three are on to the same thing. The modern world has been lying to us. We do possess free will.