Chambers and Nostalgia

For book club we read Whittaker Chambers: A Biography, by Sam Tanenhaus. It's well-written, well-researched, and adopts an objective tone toward Chambers himself. Obviously the author likes Chambers, but he portrays him flaws and all. The book gives a lively inside look at Communism in America among the intellectual elite.

The book's strongest emotional component, for me, had to do with Chambers' time at Columbia College in New York. It brought back memories of my own time there, some five decades later. Chambers departed involuntarily, as did I, and his dissatisfaction with the place to a certain extent mirrored my own:

...he was searching for something his professors could not or would not give him. Columbia's expansive curriculum - the panoramic survey courses, the piles of great books - seemed feckless to him. He detected a vacuum in the catholicity of texts and in his instructors' dexterous glide from one system of ideas to the next. They offered a "higher hodgepodge" of worldviews. He crave the one right answer to which he could dedicate himself. (page 29)

My personal inclination is to look at a question from every angle. I like to explore a variety of views. But I do believe, now as then, that the whole point is to find the actual truth.

Not every view is valid.
Quite a few are pallid
vampiric things
with bat-like wings.