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In the mid to late fifties Whitter Chambers(renounced communism and put Hiss away...hated forever by leftists) and he became friends and exchanged correspondence over the years. He once asked Chambers to join the staff of the then new National Review in one of his letters expressing exorbitant hopes for the role the publication might play in human affairs.

Chambers answer, which Mr. Buckley called "a paragraph unmatched in the literature of supine gloom, even though finally resisting despair" was thus...

It is idle [he rebuked me] to talk about preventing the wreck of Western Civilization. It is already a wreck from within. That is why we can hope to do little more now than snatch a fingernail of a saint from the rack or a handful of ashes from the faggots, and bury them secretly in a flowerpot against the day, ages hence, when a few men begin again to dare to believe that there was once something else, that something else is thinkable, and needs some evidence of what it was, and the fortifying knowledge that there were those who, at the great nightfall, took loving thought to preserve the tokens of hope and truth,

I am beginning to share his sentiments in this regard.