This was a an excellent read , both of the ideas and the person with the ideas Tony Judt. I cannot even imagine how hard it is to have ALS. I was recently called restless by someone, I guess I am. To think I initially have to walk around, till I can get focused, after I am focused then I can hunker down and actually do stuff. We develop these habits that become part of our MO, to get ALS and suddenly need to change how one thinks is something quite unbearable for me.
READ THE WHOLE THING!!!!!
To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—”is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come.”
The lecture, which lasted nearly two hours, yoked together a few themes that have long preoccupied Judt: the role of intellectuals and ideas in political life, and the failure of both Americans and Europeans to understand and learn from the past century. (We live, Judt has written, in an “age of forgetting.”) He concluded his remarks on a pragmatic note. “It would be pleasing—but misleading—to report that social democracy, or something like it, represents the future that we would paint for ourselves in an ideal world,” he said, carefully pronouncing each word. “It does not even represent the ideal past. But, among the options available to us in the present, it is better than anything else to hand.”
The standing ovation was tremendous. “I was initially shocked by the disjunction between his intellectual capacity, which is completely undiminished and in many respects unequaled, and the physical degradation,” says Richard Wolin, a professor of history at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, who was in the audience. “But after five minutes, I lost sight of any physicality and focused on his words and their importance.” He adds, “It was one of the most moving scenes I have ever witnessed.”
About a month later, I meet Judt at his apartment, on the upper floor of a tall brick building near Washington Square Park, where he lives with his wife, the dance critic Jennifer Homans, and their two teenage children. A sign on the door asks visitors to wash their hands. Judt's nurse, a young man, silently leads me through the spacious, immaculate wood-floored apartment to a book-lined study, where Judt is waiting in his wheelchair, head against a tan pillow, hands on lap, feet bare and swollen. At 61, he has close-cropped hair and a graying beard. Dressed in a maroon T-shirt and flannel pants, he peers out through circular glasses. A wireless microphone is affixed to his left ear. Though we are sitting only a few feet apart, his nurse flips the power switch, and Judt's faint voice suddenly booms out of a nearby speaker.
“We have watched the decline of 80 years of great investment in public services,” he says. “We are throwing away the efforts, ideas, and ambitions of the past.” It is plainly difficult for him to speak, but he is doggedly eloquent. His eyes, forced to do the work of his entire body, are strikingly expressive; when he gets excited, he arches his brows high and opens them wide, which he does when he says, “Communism was a very defective answer to some very good questions. In throwing out the bad answer, we have forgotten the good questions. I want to put the good questions back on the table.”
I ask how he felt after the lecture. “Elated,” Judt replies simply. Some friends and colleagues had encouraged him to scrap his planned remarks and speak instead about ALS. “I thought about it,” Judt says, “but I have nothing new to say about ALS. I do have something new to say about social democracy, and by saying it in my condition I can maybe have some influence on people's understanding of sickness.” He takes a deep breath. “There is something to be said for simply doing the thing you would do anyway, doing it as well as you can under the circumstances, and getting past the sympathy vote as soon as possible.”
via The Trials of Tony Judt – The Chronicle Review – The Chronicle of Higher Education.
