In his ending was my beginning. My beginning to learn about him and to read him. Not to get overly postmodern, but the notion of “reading” someone just struck me as odd, even grotesque, but close to what Judt managed to do particularly well during his last few years.
It’s been like listening to the siren’s call. My ‘tweeps tweet out as if saying, “Tony’s written something. You gotta go read it. Quick!” Tony’s words were siren songs themselves. His essays in The New York Review of Books and in The New York Times never failed to chasten and embarrass me. Why hadn’t I heard of this guy before? And unlike so many other offerings by the well-intentioned friends of erudition, when Judt, I. Read. Every. Word. To. The. End. In this age of hyper-skiming rather than truly reading the latest tweeted “gotta read this” link, that’s remarkable. If you’re like me, you’ve got an explosion of Zotero folders and multiple browser folders with bookmarked things “2Read”, “2Read2009″. Judt’s recently released essays deserve recognition. And not just because he was dying and we both knew it. Rather, his words and attitude demanded attention.
The recent essay “Words” (The New York Review of Books, July 15, 2010) is classic Judt for me:
I was raised on words. They tumbled off the kitchen table onto the floor where I sat: grandfather, uncles, and refugees flung Russian, Polish, Yiddish, French, and what passed for English at one another in a competitive cascade of assertion and interrogation. Sententious flotsam from the Edwardian-era Socialist Party of Great Britain hung around our kitchen promoting the True Cause. I spent long, happy hours listening to Central European autodidacts arguing deep into the night: Marxismus, Zionismus, Socialismus. Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense.
And a bit later Judt writes:
I was seduced by the sheen of English prose at its evanescent apogee.
I ask you. How can you not love that?
Tonight the tweet came. It’s what used to be the phone call. That is, the phone call. Tony Judt died. Go read this. Now.
I just did. You should, too.
Night. Night. Of course it would be at “night” and via Twitter. Somehow the idea of broad, fierce daylight and Twitter, at least at this moment, seem utterly incompatible to the point of being damning. “How dare you bask in both simultaneously?” I know that’s ridiculous. It’s just that after reading Night — and dear God in heaven! Why is it that we now have two? — basking in daylight while Twittering just doesn’t seem the thing to do…anymore.
Why?
The closest I can articulate this is simply to say that more should be done in the broad, fierce daylight than tweeting on Twitter. (I don’t mean to bash Twitter. Please feel free to substitute your favorite social media drug of choice.) After reading Judt’s Night, I feel as though tweeting should be done alone-with-others, but at the quiet times, the “post” times: post-busy day, post-dinner, post-whatever.
Yes, that’s how much the essay and the man, through the very little I read of him, affected me. If you’re going to lollygag in the fierce daylight, play and protest and do it fiercely. If you’re going to tweet, do so sincerely, alone-with-others. I guess it’s the “virtual intimacy thing” that’s washing over me because I do realize that tweeting whilst protesting is a good thing. This feeling of intimacy, no doubt, is due to our witnessing Judt’s death. From afar, to be sure. But blessed as we were just to have his voice and mind, Judt did more. Much more. To the last he held us close.
OK. I’ll speak for myself. I don’t feel as though I have been “far” from him. When I read his essays, I felt drawn into his world and with him on the last legs of his journey, accompanying him in a way no stranger has any right to demand or accept. Yet I believe this author-reader intimacy is something Judt intended. He wouldn’t have share his physical degradation with us unless he had intended to “talk” to us about it as he used it to understand himself better just as he allowed it to help us understand ourselves better, too. That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
Tony Judt is my profile in courage. It’s not just about the way he faced his death. I’ll go on a limb and say that it’s much more than that. It’s his writing. That he wrote when he wrote and how he wrote during his life, and yes, at the end. Writing can be, and often is, a scary thing to do. Some of you who won’t confess to that, will at least let it slip that writing is sometimes hard to do.
Maybe now you understand the challenge of a Tony Judt. A challenge he leaves us with, even posthumously: Are you going to write? Even when it’s hard? What have you got to say? When are you going to say it?
Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have. (from “Words“)