THE HANDSTAND |
FEBRUARY-MARCH2010
|
THE TRIALS OF
TONY JUDT
By Evan R. Goldstein
** Even as ALS tightens its grip, the historian remains
outspoken **
Chronicle Review
January 6, 2010
http://chronicle.com/article/The-Trials-of-Tony-Judt/63449/
On a Monday evening in mid-October, the historian Tony
Judt appeared onstage at the Jack H. Skirball Center for
the Performing Arts, in Greenwich Village. "I hope
you don't mind if I begin by shooting the elephant in the
house," he said, speaking from an electric
wheelchair, wrapped in a black blanket, with a Bi-Pap
breathing device attached to his nose. "As you can
see," he continued, his voice gravelly and labored,
"I'm paralyzed from the neck down, and also use this
rather ridiculous-looking tube on my face to breathe."
A little more than a year ago, Judt was diagnosed with a
progressive variant of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,
better known as Lou Gehrig's disease, a fatal condition
that gradually destroys a person's ability to move,
breathe, swallow, and talk.
In 2005, just four years earlier, the professor of
European history at New York University had reached the
pinnacle of his career with the publication of Postwar:
A History of Europe Since 1945 (Penguin Press), his
highly acclaimed account of Europe's rebirth after World
War II. The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
and was selected by the New York Times as one of
the top 10 books of the year. Beyond academe, Judt
had achieved renown as a political essayist and a
formidable combatant in the quarrels between the left and
right and within the left. He is perhaps best known as a
harsh critic of Israel and the most prominent advocate of
the creation of a single, binational state -- the so-called
one-state solution to the struggle between Palestinians
and Israelis, a position that has earned him both
plaudits and scorn.
Judt's appearance in October was part of an annual
lecture sponsored by the Remarque Institute, a cross-disciplinary
center he created in 1995 to foster greater understanding
between America and Europe. Richard Sennett, a professor
of sociology at New York University and a friend of Judt's,
says the lecture was a "legacy speech," an
opportunity for Judt to reflect on a "lifetime spent
wrestling with what it means to be on the left."
It would be Judt's first time speaking to the general
public from a wheelchair. As he dryly puts it later,
"I'm aware that I look like a complete basket case."
When he rolled out onstage, a tense hush fell upon the
more than 700 people in the theater. Judt had decided
that the logistics of working from a prepared text would
be too difficult to manage. Instead he would speak
completely from memory. Would his concentration wander?
Would he be able to ignore his unquenchable thirst,
unscratchable itches, unrelievable muscle aches?
He began by joking, referring to himself as "a
quadriplegic wearing facial Tupperware" and
promising not to use overdramatic hand gestures. The
tension abated, and Judt moved into the substance of his
talk, "What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social
Democracy?"
Judt called attention to America's and Europe's worship
of efficiency, wealth, free markets, and privatization.
We live, he said, in a world shaped by a generation of
Austrian thinkers -- the business theorist Peter Drucker,
the economists Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises,
and Joseph Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper --
who witnessed liberalism's collapse in the face of
fascism and concluded that the best way to defend
liberalism was to keep government out of economic life.
"If the state was held at a safe distance,"
Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike
would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities
have been drastically shifted to the private sector.
Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have
forgotten how to think politically and morally about
economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented
voice growing louder. 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."
Judt was born into a lower-middle-class Jewish family of
Marxist anti-Communists. They lived in London's East End,
a historically Jewish section of the city. "Anti-Semitism
at a low, polite, cultural level was still perfectly
acceptable," Judt recalls. Fearing that their
teenage son was too socially withdrawn, his parents, in
1963, sent him to a summer camp on a kibbutz in Israel.
Judt became a committed Zionist. "I was the ideal
convert," he says. A leader in left-wing Zionist
youth movements, he even delivered a keynote address at a
large Zionist conference in Paris when he was only 16
years old. (A smoker at the time, he seized the
opportunity to denounce smoking by Jewish adolescents as
a "bourgeois deviation.") In 1967, a few weeks
after the Six-Day War, Judt volunteered as a translator
for the Israel Defense Forces on the Golan Heights. He
was surprised to find that many of the young Israeli
officers he worked with were "right-wing thugs with
anti-Arab views"; others, he says, "were just
dumb idiots with guns." Israel, he came to believe,
"had turned from a sort of narrow-minded pioneer
society into a rather smug, superior, conquering society."
Disillusioned, Judt returned to England, where he had
already tested out of his final year of high school, and
gained early acceptance to the University of Cambridge.
Later he continued his studies at the École Normale
Supérieure, in Paris, where he met Annie Kriegel, a
heroine of the Resistance and an influential historian of
Communism. "She had an intellectual methodology that
combined abstract analysis with very close attention to
circumstance. It was neither political science nor
history, but it combined the best of both," Judt
says. Around the same time, he struck up a correspondence
with George Lichtheim, a German-born historian of
socialist thought. "A very brilliant, very
depressive character," Judt recalls. "His
writings on Marxism had a huge impact on me in terms of
subject matter, style, and approach." Judt dedicated
his recent collection of essays, Reappraisals:
Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century (Penguin
Press, 2008), to Kriegel and Lichtheim.
Judt's first book, La Reconstruction du Parti
Socialiste: 1921-1926, a detailed analysis of the
French Socialist Party's break with Communism, was
published in 1976 in France. Three years later, Cambridge
University Press released Socialism in Provence, 1871-1914:
A Study of the Origins of the Modern French Left, a
nuanced analysis of why the peasants of lower Provence,
battered by economic misfortune, had joined the ranks of
the French socialist movement. Such questions received a
more comprehensive treatment in Marxism and the
French Left: Studies in Labour and Politics in France,
1830-1981 (Oxford University Press, 1986). Those
early books solidified Judt's reputation as a bright
young political historian. The following year, he left
the University of Oxford for the history department at
NYU.
More and more, Judt became engaged in an internal quarrel
among leftists about their failure to look honestly at
Communism. "Tony was always attuned to a certain
kind of blindness on the extreme left toward the Soviet
Union," says Sennett. That concern informed Past
Imperfect: French Intellectuals, 1944-1956 (University
of California Press, 1992), a merciless exposé of
several left-wing luminaries -- Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone
de Beauvoir, and the Roman Catholic philosopher Emmanuel
Mounier (founder of the magazine Esprit), among
others -- for what he saw as their reckless and naïve
fellow-traveling. Reviewed on the cover of the New
York Times Book Review, the work was praised as
"a forthright and uncommonly damning study."
Numerous other commendations followed. (In The Burden
of Responsibility: Blum, Camus, Aron, and the French
Twentieth Century, a companion volume to Past
Imperfect published in 1998 by the University of
Chicago Press, Judt traced an opposite tradition -- anti-Communist
and genuinely independent -- in French political life.)
Past Imperfect emerged at a moment, after the revolutions
of 1989, when a new generation of Anglo-American scholars,
wary of the excesses of postmodernism, took a fresh look
at the intellectual legacy of the French left, says Mark
Lilla, a professor of humanities at Columbia University.
At the time, such a rethinking was already under way in
France, he says, but "there was still a cargo cult
in the American academy around Foucault and Derrida."
Judt was traveling in France when he received word of the
Times review. "I got back to New York, and
I was a star of stage and screen," he recalls, a few
minutes after summoning his nurse to adjust the angle at
which he was sitting in his wheelchair. (In obvious
discomfort, Judt nonetheless apologized for having to
briefly suspend the interview.) "Suddenly" --
he continues, picking up the conversation -- "I was
an expert on intellectuals." By year's end, he had
contributed several essays to the New York Review of
Books. Commissions poured in from other
publications.
"I wasn't looking to become a public intellectual,"
Judt insists, though he concedes that people might have
trouble believing that. As a young man, he says, he was
content with being a well-paid professor at elite
universities: "I enjoyed teaching, and sitting
in an armchair -- feet up, with a glass of wine and a
cigarette -- reading books."
Once coaxed into the public arena, Judt has earned a
reputation as a hard-hitting polemicist. Consider a 2006
essay for the London Review of Books -- "Bush's
Useful Idiots" -- in which he chided prominent
liberal thinkers -- Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael
Ignatieff, and Michael Walzer, among others -- for having
acquiesced in President George W. Bush's "catastrophic
foreign policy." Mincing no words, Judt wrote:
"Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished
precisely by their efforts to think for themselves,
rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals
should not be smugly theorizing endless war, much less
confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be
engaged in disturbing the peace -- their own above all."
In response, Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and
political science at Yale University, and Todd Gitlin, a
professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia,
drafted a manifesto, signed by a number of prominent
academics, that dismissed Judt's claims as "nonsense
on stilts." Everyone who signed, they pointed out,
had "opposed the Iraq war as illegal, unwise, and
destructive of America's moral standing."
Elsewhere, Judt has described the cold-war historian John
Lewis Gaddis's "thumbnail sketches" of
Communist doctrine as "clunky and a bit embarrassing,"
and has written that the New York Times
columnist Thomas L. Friedman's "portentous, Pulitzer-winning
pieties are always carefully road tested for middle-brow
political acceptability," and that the eminent
British historian Eric Hobsbawm, a longtime Communist,
"refuses to stare evil in the face and call it by
its name." Last year Judt won the Orwell Prize,
awarded annually in recognition of journalism that has
best achieved George Orwell's aim to "make political
writing into an art." The citation praises him as a
"controversialist."
Early in 2002, when Judt was at home recovering from
radiation and surgery to treat cancer in his left arm, he
became "more and more worried about the failure of
Israel to do the right thing." In May of that year,
the New York Review published his first major
statement on the Middle East conflict, the solution to
which, he contended, was obvious: two states, the
dismantling of Jewish settlements in the occupied
territories, and no right of return to Israel for
Palestinian refugees. Judt fingered Israel for the bloody
impasse, provocatively likening its actions to those of
France in its colonial war against Algeria. By 1958, he
noted, the damage that French policy was inflicting on
the Algerians was surpassed by the harm France was
inflicting upon itself. Israel, he wrote, was in a
similarly dire predicament.
Judt's historical analogy drew sharp rejoinders. "If
Israel resembles French Algeria, why exactly should
Israel and its national doctrine, Zionism, be regarded as
any more legitimate than France's imperialism?"
asked the political writer Paul Berman. That was a good
question. A few months later, Judt revised his position.
"The time has come to think the unthinkable,"
he proclaimed in a widely disseminated essay in The New
York Review. The two-state solution -- a Jewish state and
an Arab state -- "is probably already doomed,"
and the least-bad option remaining was for Israel to
convert from a Jewish state to a binational state. "The
depressing truth," Judt wrote, "is that Israel
today is bad for the Jews."
According to Benny Morris, a professor of history at Ben-Gurion
University of the Negev and author of One State, Two
States: Resolving the Israel/Palestine Conflict (Yale
University Press, 2009), Judt's essay placed the one-state
idea "squarely and noisily on the table of
international agendas." The Forward
described it as "the intellectual equivalent of a
nuclear bomb on Zionism." Within weeks, the New
York Review had received more than 1,000 letters to
the editor. Suddenly, says Robert Boyers, editor of the
quarterly Salmagundi and an observer of the
liberal intellectual scene, Judt was a major voice
weighing in on the Middle East. Indeed, if the death of
Judt's friend the literary critic Edward Said, in 2003,
left a "yawning void" in the national
conversation about Israel, Palestine, and the
Palestinians, as Judt has suggested, then it is Judt
himself who has filled that void.
And like Said, who also advocated a one-state solution,
Judt has become a very public target for criticism. An op-ed
essay in the Jerusalem Post accused him of
"pandering to genocide." Omer Bartov, a
professor of European history at Brown University,
dismissed the binational idea as "absurd";
Walzer, co-editor of Dissent magazine, derided it as an
escapist fantasy that "offers no practical escape
from the work of repressing the terrorist organizations
and withdrawing from the Occupied Territories."
Steven J. Zipperstein, a professor of Jewish culture and
history at Stanford University and a close friend of Judt's
for a quarter of a century, blasted the article as "one
more in a long series of calls (perhaps the silliest yet)
for Jewish self-immolation."
The most trenchant critique is that Judt's embrace of
binationalism echoes the reckless, unrealistic style of
trafficking in ideas that he condemned in Past
Imperfect. "I, too, wish everyone was a
cosmopolitan Kantian, and we had one huge democracy for
the brotherhood of all mankind," says Gadi Taub, a
professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and
author of a forthcoming book, The Settlers and the
Struggle Over the Meaning of Zionism (Yale
University Press). "But these are two peoples (Jews
and Palestinians) severely traumatized by the lack of
national independence." To argue that such a
situation lends itself to shared sovereignty in a
binational state is, says Taub, "the strikingly
irresponsible kind of thing that intellectuals sometimes
do for their own convenience vis-à-vis their own
conscience. In reality, a one-state solution will doom
Israelis and Palestinians to a permanent civil war."
Judt seems unconcerned that his public image is now so
tied to his views on Israel. "Google me," he
says nonchalantly. "You will end up at the
binationalism essay straightaway." He goes on to
observe that "to the outside world, I'm a crazed,
self-hating Jewish left-winger." Joking aside, Judt
is not entirely comfortable in his role as the public
face of the anti-Zionist crowd. "I wouldn't call
myself anti-Zionist, because there are openly anti-Semitic
people who use anti-Zionism as a cover," he explains.
Some of them, like the white nationalist David Duke, have
reached out to him, prompting accusations that he is
giving intellectual cover to bigots. Despite such "foul
vilification," says the Columbia historian Fritz
Stern, "Tony has, if anything, only become more
outspoken."
There have been efforts to silence Judt. In October 2006,
a lecture he was to give at the Polish consulate in New
York was abruptly canceled following complaints by the
Anti-Defamation League and the American Jewish Committee.
The ensuing crush of media attention placed Judt at the
center of a free-speech fracas. The story was picked up
by the press in France, England, and Poland; "Judt
at War," declared a headline in the New York
Observer, which quoted Judt denouncing the ADL's
national director, Abraham H. Foxman, and some other
leaders of American Jewish organizations as "illiberal
lying bigots" and "fascists." More than
100 prominent scholars and intellectuals, many of whom
disagree with Judt's views, signed a petition denouncing
the "climate of intimidation" that surrounded
the cancellation of his lecture.
"Tony is a man who thrives on controversy,"
says Richard Sennett. When I read that quote to Judt, he
balks. "Richard is being a bit mischievous,"
Judt replies without smiling. He concedes that he has
"always been verbally provocative" but that he
doesn't seek out controversy. A day after our meeting,
Judt followed up in an e-mail message: "I hate
publicity, celebrity, fame, and notoriety, all of which
are associated with controversy in its public form. But,
in fairness, all my life I've been rather upfront with my
opinions and never hidden them on grounds of conformity
or (I fear) politesse. However, until the wretched Polish
consulate affair, I don't think I was ever controversial
-- I was certainly not known outside of the hermetic
little world of the academy, and my contrarian scholarly
writings aroused no great fuss."
There was a fuss, however, when in 1979 the journal History
Workshop published an attack by Judt, then a
professor at the University of California at Berkeley, on
the field of social history. "A whole discipline is
being degraded and abused" by the postmodern turn
toward identity and feminist history, he wrote. (The
essay, he tells me, placed his bid for tenure in jeopardy.)
By the early 1980s, his displeasure with the field had
evolved into a deep malaise. It was around that time that
he met the Czech dissident Jan Kavan, living in exile in
London, who in later years would serve as foreign
minister and deputy prime minister of the post-Communist
Czech Republic. Through him and others, Judt, who had
since moved to Oxford, developed an interest in
Czechoslovakia and, more broadly, in Eastern Europe.
He bought a copy of Teach Yourself Czech,
studied for two hours every night, and enrolled in
language classes at the university. By the mid-80s,
he was competent in Czech, and in 1985 he traveled to
Prague as part of a group organized by the English
philosopher Roger Scruton and the Jan Hus Educational
Foundation, an Oxford-centered organization that
supported samizdat publishing and other clandestine
cultural activities in Czechoslovakia. During that visit,
the first of many, Judt helped smuggle in banned books
and lectured to crowded rooms in private apartments. It
was there that he recovered his passion for the politics
and history of Europe.
When he first arrived at NYU, in 1987, "there was a
sense that if you had good ideas, they would let you act
on them," Judt says. So in 1995, when he was
weighing a "very tempting" offer to join the
Committee on Social Thought, at the University of Chicago,
he proposed pursuing his interest in European and
American relations by setting up the Remarque Institute.
NYU, eager to keep him, agreed. With typical self-assurance,
Judt told the university, "Give me 10 years, and I
will give you a world-famous institute." According
to Wolin, Judt has succeeded by nurturing a continuing
conversation -- through conferences, workshops, and
fellowships -- among European and American academics.
"If you're a European scholar of modern politics and
history, and you want to be known in America, Remarque is
a rite of passage," Wolin says. Fritz Stern, who is
on the institute's board, adds that "Tony has turned
it into a major international center." The institute's
reputation is almost inextricably tied to that of Judt,
for good and ill. (Two board members resigned after he
came out in favor of a binational future for Israelis and
Palestinians.)
In Judt's mind, however, his "greatest achievement"
is his book Postwar. In 1945, Europe lay
in ruins. Some 36.5 million of its inhabitants died
between 1939 and 1945. Most of those who survived were
starving or without shelter; Germany had lost 40 percent
of its homes, Britain 30 percent, France 20 percent. Yet
in the next 60 years, Judt writes, Europe had improbably
become "a paragon of the international virtues,"
and its social model -- free or nearly free medical care,
early retirement, robust social and public services --
stood as "an exemplar for all to emulate."
Postwar tells the story of how that happened.
The book is ambitiously organized to combine the whole of
the postwar history of Europe -- Western and Eastern --
into a single conceptual framework. The result is not a
work of dispassionate scholarship. In the preface, Judt
describes his approach as an "avowedly personal
interpretation" of the recent European past. "In
a word that has acquired undeservedly pejorative
connotations," he writes, Postwar is "opinionated."
Judt's thesis, developed through 900 pages, is this:
Europe remade itself by forgetting its past. "The
first postwar Europe was built upon deliberate mis-memory
-- upon forgetting as a way of life." And there was
much to forget: collaboration, genocide, extreme
deprivation.
Translated into 19 languages, Postwar has been
received by critics as a masterpiece. "A remarkable
book," declared the Harvard University English
professor Louis Menand in the New Yorker. "The
writing is vivid; the coverage -- of little countries as
well as the great ones -- is virtually superhuman; and,
above all, the book is smart." According to
the Oxford political theorist Alan Ryan, Postwar
has the "pace of a thriller and the scope of an
encyclopedia." Krzysztof Michalski, a professor of
philosophy at Boston University and rector of the
Institute for Human Sciences, in Vienna, where Judt is a
permanent fellow, says, "Tony is one of the few
first-rate Western intellectuals with a nonideological
interest in Eastern Europe."
By last February, Judt could no longer move his hands.
"I thought it would be catastrophic," he
recalls matter-of-factly. How would he write? He
discovered that a lifetime of lecturing -- often without
notes and in complete sentences and full paragraphs --
had trained him to think out loud. He can now, "with
a bit of mental preparation," dictate "an essay
or an intellectually thoughtful e-mail." Unable to
jot down ideas on a yellow pad, Judt has taught himself
elaborate memorization schemes of the sort described by
the Yale historian Jonathan D. Spence in his 1984 book, The
Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci. Like Ricci, a
16th-century Jesuit missionary to China, Judt imagines
structures in his head where he can store his thoughts
and ideas. The basic principle: Picture entering a large
house; turn left and there is a room with shelves and
tables; leave a memory on each surface until the rooms
fills. Now head down the hall into another room. To
retrieve your memories, to reconstruct a lecture or
recall the content and structure of an article, you re-enter
the building and follow the same path, which should
trigger the ideas you left behind.
"It works," Judt says. In fact, he tells me,
his mental acuity has grown stronger over the past year.
He compares his situation to that of a blind person with
uniquely sensitive ears, or of a deaf person with
extraordinary eyesight. "I knew it to be
theoretically true that when you are deprived of
everything else, the thing you are not deprived of gets
better," he says. "But it has been very odd to
experience that in practice." After a moment, he
goes on: "I'm a 61-year-old guy, I'm not as sharp as
I was when I was 51. But the things I could do last year
I can do better this year."
He recently signed a contract to expand his lecture on
social democracy into a short book, which he hopes will
be published in the late spring. "I've got a huge
amount of mental energy," he says. Colleagues and
friends are understandably protective of Judt and are
wary of commenting on his physical decline. ("You're
not going to write about his illness or the fact that he's
dying," Sennett says at the outset of our
conversation, more as an order than a question.) The life
expectancy of an ALS patient averages two to five years
from the time of diagnosis.
At bedtime, having been maneuvered from his wheelchair to
his cot and positioned upright, his glasses removed, Judt
is left alone with his thoughts. In recent months,
they have turned to his youth -- the charms of a
curmudgeonly grade-school German-language instructor, the
shifting cultural mores of Cambridge in the mid-60s, the
comforting solitude of a train ride. At the
encouragement of his friend Timothy Garton Ash, a
professor of European studies at Oxford, he has crafted
those "little vignettes from my past" into a
series of autobiographical sketches.
In one moving essay, recently published in the New
York Review, Judt addresses directly his life with
ALS. "Helplessness," he writes, "is
humiliating even in a passing crisis -- imagine or recall
some occasion when you have fallen down or otherwise
required physical assistance from strangers.
Imagine the mind's response to the knowledge that the
peculiarly humiliating helplessness of ALS is a life
sentence (we speak blithely of death sentences in this
connection, but actually the latter would be a relief)."
Before I leave his apartment, as night falls, I ask him
why he decided to write such a personal account of his
illness. He pauses, inhales deeply, and says,
without drama or self-pity, "This is an imprisoning
disease, and every now and then there is a desperate
desire to break out of the prison and tell people what it
is like." Judt takes another deep breath.
"The disease is like being put in prison for life,
no parole, and the prison is shrinking by six inches
every week. I know that at some point in the future
it's going to crush me to death, but I don't know exactly
when."
--Evan R. Goldstein is a staff editor at the Chronicle
Review.
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