BOOKS
475
the past, where the normally optuTIlsnc "rent rooms by the day, the
most pessimistic by the week."
But it is essentially a book which, in Sperber's words, attempts "to
transmit the evolution of conscience." Others in the genre have con–
veyed a more coherent philosophy, a more vivid sense of the power of
evil and the evil of power; but none, I think, has so forcefully conveyed
the meaning and high tragedy of the Communist experience. The
period Sperber is writing about was one in which as he has someone
say, the revolution defeated all of its friends and none of its enemies.
It was a pivotal period. At the beginning, the idea, though long since
violated and fatally infected (Sperber holds it to be self-infection, but
that is another matter), retained certain large elements of grace. At
the end, it retained none--or at least it had become possible to perceive
the grace that remained only by refusing to perceive the real world.
Sperber is as much concerned with evoking the grace, the ominous
grace as he sees it, of the idea as he is with studying the infection. "Of
all those who have renounced the search for grandeur and permanence
as expressed in terms of God, we alone," a Communist says, "have
attempted to transform the conditions of humanity so drastically that
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