i have a thing for cambridge boys. and one of them isn’t doing so well. as some may know, tony judt – the author of post war, and that great intellectual who can be found discussing living and dying in a social democracy here, is, well, dying. diagnosed with advanced lou gheric’s back in 2008, the man has been reduced to a shadow of his former self. he has lost much of his motor function, and now relies entirely on others for the most simple of tasks.
here he introduces himself to the audience as a “quadriplegic wearing facial tupperware,” and the “original talking head.” despite the heavy breathing that punctuates his speech (a 90 minute long feat), he is doggedly eloquent in his addressing the question: why the cognitive dissonance between the world we desire and the one we are willing to put up stakes for? (the lecture has now been expanded into a book titled ill fares the land, by penguine press, due out next week. it is billed as “an essay on the possibility of living differently”)
judt is probably the only academic that i truly felt close affinity towards. i haven’t agreed with all of his politics, but have certainly been stirred, inspired, outraged, and touched by much of what he had had to say all these years.
and reading this article in the new york magazine, i am again crestfallen at the inevitability of good things coming to an end.
in the article, he talks of an “urgency about the need to be angrier about what needs doing, what needs saving, and what needs changing” and this restlessness to do something is familiar: i have caught glimpses of this fury and some-time rage in many of my friends, and it is this sense of constant that comforts me.
judt says that this renewed need to engage with the world has kept him grounded against the backdrop of devastating illness. though his writing covers a wide range of issues – some polemic and all profound – the questions inevitably return to dying. and in the last few paragraphs of the nymag article, judt shares his candid reflections on the human condition.
“I thought of this as a stroke of catastrophic bad luck. Neither unjust, because after all, there is no justice in luck; nor unfair—‘Why me and not you?’—which would be a ridiculous way to think of it; nor implausible, because it’s so implausible that plausibility is off the scale. Nor does it have meaning: One thing I always felt very strongly empathetic about in my reading of [the Italian chemist and Holocaust diarist] Primo Levi was his absolutely clearheaded sense that none of what had happened to him in the camps had any meaning. You might draw lessons from it in terms of experience, you certainly might draw political lessons. But at the existential level of one man’s life, it had no meaning. This has no meaning. What I do with it is up to me. History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there’s been tremendous progress in knowledge, behavior, laws, civilization. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it. And if you can’t find a meaning behind history, what would be the meaning of any single life? I was born accidentally. I lived accidentally in London. We nearly migrated to New Zealand. So much of my life has been a product of chance, I can’t see a meaning in it at all. I can just see the good stuff that happened and the bad stuff. The meaning of our life is only incorporated in the way other people feel about us. Once I die, my life will acquire meaning in the way they see whatever it is I did, for them, for the world, the people I’ve known. I have no control of that. All I can do is do the best, now.”
