I don't really know how to start my great multitude of thoughts on this book, so I will let Chambers speak first. Here are only a handful (I have five pages worth of highlighted passages written in a notebook) of my favorites.
"Thus we crossed that bridge from death to life which faith said "Try" but cold reason said "Even to think of trying is hopeless."
"Of course, we do not simply step from evil to good, even recognizing that any human good and evil is seldom more than a choice between less evil and more good. In that transition we drag ourselves like cripples. We are cripples. In any such change as I was making, the soul itself is in flux. How hideous our transformations are, wavering monstrously in their incompleteness as in a distorting mirror, until the commotion settles and the soul's new proportions are defined."
"In that change, practicality and precaution are of no more help than prudence or craft. It is a transit that must be made upon the knees, or not at all. For it is only to the graves of dead brothers that we find ourselves powerless at last to bring anything but prayer. We are equally powerless at the graves of ourselves, once we know that we live in shrouds."
"At the end, all men simply pray, and prayer takes as many forms as there are men, without exception we pray. We pray because there is nothing else to do, and because that is where God is- where there is nothing else."
"What immunity can the world offer a man against his thoughts?
"Men have never been so educated, but wisdom, even as an idea, has conspicuously vanished from the world."
"[Communism's] triumph means slavery to men wherever they fall under its sway and spiritual night to the human mind and soul."
"I know that he and all his generation may soon bear witness of a kind before which every other shrinks in humility; and I want him to have a standard as simple as stepping into the dark and raising his eyes whereby to measure what he is and what he is not against the order of reality."
Note: This review minimizes the greatness of this book because I cannot say what I feel about 800 pages into a single blog with an utter completeness.
Whittaker Chambers had a twisted, eerie, and fantastically tragic childhood. The peculiarities and depressing moments of his youth give deep insight into what horrible events and emotions foced him into such a terrible regime, what made him believe in a philosophy of atheism and slavery. As a strict capitalist and believer in free market principles, I am sad to say that I honestly do not know what path I would have chosen if I had his childhood, and I believe that is a testament to the emotional torture and confusion he was compelled to battle with.
And because Chambers is a phenomenal writer, his childhood, one which Americans haven't heard about nor care about, was one of the most interesting parts of the book for me to read, even though I intended to only read about
the case. I cannot articulate the full extent of my thoughts on his brother's death, but they resonate very well with Chamber's own words: "I never questioned that my brother's death was due to great weaknesses in himself. But it was also due to strength and clarity- his undeflected vision of his own weaknesses and of the world in which, they had come to light and to grief. That world was dying of its own vulgarity, stupidity, complacency, inhumanity, power and materialism-a death of the spirit. The toxins of its slow decay poisoned all life within it- but first of all that life which was most gentle and most decent because its sensitivity(that is to say, in part, its weakness), made it most sucseptible and most incurable."
One of the points he made about the new dealers that I loved was that they are socialists and communists. The New Deal was a genuine revolution, only one of economic instead of violent proportions. And the reasons liberals feel so wildly malicious to anti-communists is that they see no diffrence between the philisopical principles of what they believe in and what the communists believe in. The innate ideas and philospohies are the same, the only reason they can exist is that the liberals try to keep their extremely radical ideas swept under the rug.
This book has racked me up and has obliged me to rethink my beliefs on religion and politics. And I still haven't found my answers yet and I'm left exceptionally confused. Chambers' beliefs were the complete opposite of Ayn Rand's, which I was supposed to believe in after I read Atlas Shrugged. But they definitely do not agree, as Chambers wrote an essay ridiculing Atlas Shrugged called 'Big Sister is Watching You'. I agreed with his logic of the flaws in the book only at the surface. Things like how it is weird that there are no children or the laughable fact that every "good" person in the book was unfathomably beautiful. But he disagrees with her in a very large way, too. Not because of the fact that he was a communist and she a capitalist, but because he believes in God. Rand has a whole chapter in her book that condemned the idea of a paradox because she believed they did not and could not exist by matter of reason and logic, but Chambers quoted this of his most personal statement:"Christian faith is a paradox which is the sum of paradoxes. Its passion mounts, like a surge of music, insubstantial and sustaining, between two great cries of the spirit- the paradoxic sadness of 'Lord, I believe; help Thou mine unbelief...I believe because it is impossible." So, if he believes paradoxes can exist in the most miraculous of ideas, and they can be pious, he therefore believes they exist very surely in life. Does the existence of God grant a truth that paradoxes exist? I don't know. Because God means that humans are more than beasts; they have freedom from slavery because their minds are wonderful and God-given (power of mind= no paradox because paradoxes do not exist with logic) but then if God exists than things are illogical(in the sense that humans cannot reason it) which means paradoxes do exist.... Maybe I just answered it then.. Because in saying that it can be neither becasue it has to be both means that there is a paradox.
So then does that mean I have to believe in what Chambers believes? Because he seems like the greatest pessimist that ever lived and I think of him cowardly when he tried to kill himself. And he believes that man should live simply, hard working and loving because he has been given life by God, so he is belittled, nothing more than a dirty rag at best. But then that seems like a sort of communist way of thinking...that he is not unique and not important so he should not stive to succeed (excluding the God part).
I suppose my larges question in that it has the most direct effect on my life(and afterlife) is does God hate wealth? Chambers believes so. As the senior editor of time he chose to be a farmer because its those kinds of men "whose habitual labors hold the crumbling world together." (communist view again!) Because its the big business owners to create jobs and wealth and inventions, but it is the farmers who grow the necessities and don't deal with the ungodly stuff, instead with the raw earth in its purest form.
I'm at a loss.
