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Be not troubled, for all things are according to nature and in a little while you will be no one and nowhere. – Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

People usually associate David Horowitz, former radical leftist and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, with the intellectual pugilism that has made him the nemesis of the left, in books such as _Indoctrination U: The Left’s War Against Academic Freedom_ and _Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left_. But his new book A Point In Time caps an unofficial trilogy of lyrical meditations that began with _The End of Time_, then progressed through _A Cracking of the Heart_. In his latest, he uses the works of Marcus Aurelius and Fyodor Dostoevsky as starting points for his own intimate reflections on meaning and mortality.

Mark Tapson: How does this new book relate to your previous work?

David Horowitz: Most of my writings are engagements in the battles of our time. They are books designed to defend free societies in the face of the assault the left has mounted against them. I have written books to support individual rights and therefore property rights, and racial tolerance, and to uphold intellectual standards and intellectual freedom. My new book has a different inspiration, and in that way is a kind of sequel to another I wrote in the wake of ⁹⁄₁₁.

A month after the Islamic attacks, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, which brought me up against the wall of my own mortality. I was fortunate enough to survive this round in a war we are all destined to lose, but it changed the way I looked at myself and the world. It caused me to step back and take in our human predicament, and to think about how we address it. The book I then began to write about these matters was different in both substance and tone from the other books I had written. I called it The End of Time. It was partly memoir and partly a reflection on what I had learned.

My new book, A Point in Time, is also partly memoir and partly reflections. It attempts to look at who we are as transient actors in all these dramas, and to consider what they mean to us. It is a summing up of what I have learned over the course of a lifetime.

The subtitle of this book is “The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next,” which is the way I sum up the escapes we attempt from the no-win situation that mortality imposes on us. Our quests for happiness, for fame, and especially for a “better world” are efforts to distract ourselves from the fact that our lives are meaningless, and that life is meaningless, and that one day all our achievements and all of the achievements of mankind itself will disappear and be forgotten.

MT: You begin by describing your daily interaction with your dogs and horses, and return time and again to them in the book. Why did they serve as inspiration and points of reference for the meditations in this book?

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