Motley Moose – Archive

Tony Judt, Professor of History at NYU, historian, thinker, teacher and polemicist, died surrounded by his family in his Manhattan Apartment yesterday afternoon, having struggled for two long years with Lou Gehrig’s disease.

I’ve written about Tony before, and here’s a picture of us both (me on the right, Tony in the middle, and Polish producer and activist Krzysztof Czyzewski on the left) from happier days in Oxford three years ago.

Though not unexpected, this is a personal loss for me, because Tony was both friend and mentor (as another friend has written “severe and kind”). I’d recently interviewed him for Prospective Magazine, and written an appraisal of his heroic stand on European history, Identity Politics, Israel, Iraq, and the corruptions of Marxism and the future of the left, published only this month….

A very brief diary, partly because my word’s can’t match that of my subject – and also because I find this too painful to write too much.

Tony Judt, a British Historian and Professor of History at NYU, was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in September 2008. There’s a quite incredible unsentimental and unsparing piece about living with the illness in the current issue of The New York Review of Books. Just to give you a harrowing sample…

During the day I can at least request a scratch, an adjustment, a drink, or simply a gratuitous re-placement of my limbs-since enforced stillness for hours on end is not only physically uncomfortable but psychologically close to intolerable…

But then comes the night. I leave bedtime until the last possible moment compatible with my nurse’s need for sleep. Once I have been “prepared” for bed I am rolled into the bedroom in the wheelchair where I have spent the past eighteen hours… I am sat upright at an angle of some 110° and wedged into place with folded towels and pillows, my left leg in particular turned out ballet-like to compensate for its propensity to collapse inward. This process requires considerable concentration. If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.

…and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts

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