{"id":317,"date":"2010-03-31T05:49:53","date_gmt":"2010-03-31T05:49:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/?p=317"},"modified":"2010-03-31T08:37:37","modified_gmt":"2010-03-31T08:37:37","slug":"public-intellectual-number-one","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/?p=317","title":{"rendered":"public intellectual number one"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite public intellectuals, Tony Judt, is writing his memoirs via a series of essays in the New York Review of Books<\/a>. At least a handful of them are available to the public and I can’t recommend them enough.<\/p>\n

Although Tony hasn’t said it, I think there’s some real urgency on his part to get his story written down, because his health has deteriorated so severely in the last year and a half, since he was diagnosed with ALS. More than several weeks ago I linked to the first essay I read, Night<\/a>; it’s an eloquent, brave and very powerful account of his experience with the disease – much of which got referenced in this recent interview<\/a> with Terri Gross. He said this thing while talking with Terri, that I’ve been thinking about for the last day.\u00a0 Terri asked Tony if people were expecting him to write about the life lessons he’s learned from ALS and he responded:<\/p>\n

Gosh, I have no idea. I mean, I think my answer to that question is this: It’s a bit like, if you’ll allow me the analogy, which is a bit of a stretch, it’s a bit like what Primo Levi wrote about his experience of Auschwitz, which is to say that however terrible it was, that whatever he did to survive it, he doesn’t believe there’s any larger lesson or moral story to be learned from it. Because when you are hit by something as bad as a concentration camp, you survive, and there’s no lesson to be taught about surviving except how to do it. <\/em><\/p>\n

In my case, I survive quite comfortably at one level because this is one of the worst diseases you can imagine, but it has no pain. So you have a lot of time in your untroubled head to think out of body, so to speak, about the reasons why the body doesn’t work, the implications of being immobile for hours on end. <\/em><\/p>\n

I think the only life experience that I have to offer out of this is something we all know in the abstract but don’t experience in practice very much. That is that you can survive an awful lot of bad stuff, so long as your mind is intact. I’m afraid that’s the only life experience I have to offer. <\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’m not sure what to add\u00a0 except I’m grateful for how honest and direct a response he gave. Tony wasn’t dangling out some silver lining. He didn’t recount a list of the “20 things I learned from ALS before it killed me.” I keep thinking how much we struggle to deal what he said, the thing we know in the abstract, but don’t get a lot of practice with, which is surviving some really bad stuff.<\/p>\n

Seriously, check out the interview of read the Night<\/em> essay or both.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite public intellectuals, Tony Judt, is writing his memoirs via a series of essays in the New York Review of Books. At least a handful of them are available to the public and I can’t recommend them enough. Although Tony hasn’t said it, I think there’s some real urgency on his part […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-317","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reading"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=317"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=317"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.proteanme.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}