I had a chat with a friend today. He mentioned Whittaker Chambers, and that he sometimes thinks that Chambers was right, that we were on the losing side of history, and the fight itself is the only reward.
I mentioned something I believed Chambers had said, that all we could do was to preserve the “fingers bones of the saints” through the coming Dark Age. I wrote to him after I’d had a few minutes to mull our conversation, and to noodle a little on the Internet. Below, lightly edited, is what I sent.
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I recalled the Chambers quote incorrectly. He did not say “finger bones of the saints” as I have been misquoting him for years now.
Here is the passage which I remembered erroneously:
That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and need some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth.
(From William F. Buckley’s memoir of Chambers, here.)
Damn, that is beautiful.
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