'Nothing More Important Than This Wound'

I’m skeptical of prophecy, weighing even the scriptural sort against the evidence and the suitability of the prophet. People tend to concur with those prophecies that confirm their a priori prejudices, but only retrospectively can we test the Jeremiah du jour’s predictions. 

In a letter to William F. Buckley dated Oct. 8, 1956, Whittaker Chambers writes: “The age is impaled on its most maiming experience, namely, that a man can be simply or savagely—above all, pointlessly—wiped out, regardless of what he is, means, hopes, dreams or might become. This reality cuts across our minds like a wound whose edges crave to heal, but cannot. Thus, one of the great sins, perhaps the great sin, is to say: It will heal; it has healed; there is no wound. There is nothing more important than this wound.”

 

That’s what some of us finally and reluctantly began to learn twenty-five years ago today. Evil was not a theory or abstraction. There are people in the world who would happily kill us – not for anything we as individuals have done but because we stubbornly persist in our being. We are alive only because they haven’t yet managed to murder us. Chambers was the blackest of pessimists and his pessimism was rooted in his experience as a Communist and a spy for the Soviet Union. He understood the seductive power of nihilism. In his masterpiece Witness (1952) he writes:

 

“Crime, violence, infamy are not tragedy. Tragedy occurs when a human soul awakes and seeks, in suffering and pain, to free itself from crime, violence, infamy, even at the cost of life. The struggle is the tragedy - not defeat or death. That is why the spectacle of tragedy has always filled men, not with despair, but with a sense of hope and exaltation.”

 

[The Chambers letter is collected in Odyssey of a Friend: Whittaker Chambers’ Letters to William F. Buckley, Jr. 1954-1961 (1969).]