Letter from Westminster

A watchful reader notes that I closed a recent piece in this magazine by saying: “We have visibly reached a point of change, a turning-point, which has not its like in history.” He also recalls that I used the same phrase several years ago, in an article (about the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party) in Life magazine. “You rang several changes on it then,” he writes. “Does this phrase have some mystic meaning for you, not known to the rest of us? Is it an incantation? Or is it just that you can’t think of anything else to say?”

I suppose that, in a way, it is an incantation, in the sense that it is meant to evoke something—to be a reminder of something though it is never identified—so that readers, coming on it, may feel a little uneasily: That theme again. I have used it deliberately somewhat like that leitmotif which, now and again, stirs under the dense overcast of Wagnerian sounds to remind us that Fate is still at work.

WC

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Whittaker Chambers

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A watchful reader notes that I closed a recent piece in this magazine by saying: “We have visibly reached a point of change, a turning-point, which has not its like in history.” He also recalls that I used the same phrase several years ago, in an article (about the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party) in Life magazine. “You rang several changes on it then,” he writes. “Does this phrase have some mystic meaning for you, not known to the rest of us? Is it an incantation? Or is it just that you can’t think of anything else to say?”

I suppose that, in a way, it is an incantation, in the sense that it is meant to evoke something—to be a reminder of something though it is never identified—so that readers, coming on it, may feel a little uneasily: That theme again. I have used it deliberately somewhat like that leitmotif which, now and again, stirs under the dense overcast of Wagnerian sounds to remind us that Fate is still at work.