One Response to About

1. SallyVee says:

   2011.10.24 at 14:31

   Hello Mr. Chambers.

   My husband and I are both nearly finished reading Witness.

   I feel like the teenage Jewish kid who tried rather pitifully to express his gratitude and respect for your grandfather. It’s impossible to describe how deeply moving and informative I find the book. I am right now avoiding finishing the last 50 or so pages because I don’t want it to end and because my affection for Whittaker Chambers is so great. Silly, but true.

   Along the way I’ve been transcribing sections here and there, and emailing to friends. This is the most recent excerpt I chose, and perhaps my favorite of all:

   [excerpt from page 617]
   

   There was another heavy pause. I knew that there must be something that Luce wanted to tell me or ask me, but I was too weary to help him. Suddenly he said, “I’ve been reading about the young man born blind.”

   [...] “No, no,” Luce said impatiently, “I mean the young man born blind. It’s in the eighth or ninth chapter of St. John. They brought Our Lord a young man who had been blind from birth and asked Him one of those catch questions: ‘Whose is the sin, this man’s or his parents’, that he was born blind?’ Our Lord took some clay and wet it with saliva and placed it on the blind man’s eyes so that they opened and he could see. Then Our Lord gave an answer, not one of His clever answers, but a direct, simple answer. He said: ‛Neither this man sinned nor his parents, but that the works of God should be made manifest in him.’ ”

   Slowly, there sank into my mind the tremendous thing that Luce was saying to me, and the realization that he had brought me there so that he could say those words of understanding kindness. He was saying: “You are the young man born blind. All you had to offer God was your blindness that through the action of your recovered sight, His works might be made manifest.”

   In the depths of the Hiss Case, in grief, weakness and despair, the words that Luce had repeated to me came back to strengthen me.

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