The Memory Chalet Read Free Page A

more inductive quality to them. Their value rests on an essentially impressionistic effect: the success with which I have related and interwoven the private and the public, the reasoned and the intuited, the recalled and the felt.
    I don’t know what sort of a genre this is. Certainly the resulting little wooden boys seem to me both more loosely articulated and yet more fully human than their deductively constructed, rigorously predesigned forebears. In more polemical form—“Austerity,” perhaps—they seem to me unintentionally to recall the long-forgotten feuilletons of Karl Kraus’s Vienna: allusive, suggestive, almost too light for their urgent content. But others—in a more affectionate vein, recalling “Food” or perhaps “Putney”—serve the contrary purpose. By avoiding the heavy abstractions so familiar from the prose of “identity-seeking” narrators, they may succeed in discovering precisely such buried contours without claiming to do so.
    Reading over these feuilletons I suppose I am struck by the man I never became. Many decades ago I was advised to study literature; history, it was suggested to me by a wise schoolmaster, would play too readily towards the grain of my instincts—allowing me to do what came easiest. Literature—poetry in particular—would force me to find within myself unfamiliar words and styles to which I might yet discover a certain affinity. I can hardly say that I regret not following this advice: my conservative intellectual habits have served me well enough. But I do think something was lost.
    Thus I realize that as a child I was observing far more than I understood. Perhaps all children do this, in which case what distinguishes me is only the opportunity that catastrophic ill health has afforded me to retrieve those observations in a consistent manner. And yet I wonder. When people ask me “But how do you remember the smell of the Green Line bus?” or “What was it about the detail of French country hotels that so stuck with you?” the implication is that some sort of little memory chalets were already under construction.
    But nothing could be further from the truth. I just lived that childish past, perhaps connecting it up to other bits of itself more than most children are wont to do, but certainly never imaginatively repositioning it in my memory for future use. To be sure, I was a solitary child and kept my thoughts to myself. But this hardly renders me distinctive. If memory came back to me so readily in recent months, I think it is for a different reason.
    The advantage of my profession is that you have a story into which you can insert example, detail, illustration. As a historian of the postwar world, recalling in silent self-interrogation details of his own life as lived through it, I have the advantage of a narrative which both connects and embellishes otherwise disjointed recollections. To be blunt, what distinguishes me from many others who—as my recent correspondence suggests—have comparable memories is that I have a variety of uses to which I can put them. For this alone I consider myself a very lucky man.
    It might be thought the height of poor taste to ascribe good fortune to a healthy man with a young family struck down at the age of sixty by an incurable degenerative disorder from which he must shortly die. But there is more than one sort of luck. To fall prey to a motor neuron disease is surely to have offended the Gods at some point, and there is nothing more to be said. But if you must suffer thus, better to have a well-stocked head: full of recyclable and multipurpose pieces of serviceable recollection, readily available to an analytically disposed mind. All that was missing was a storage cupboard. That I should have been fortunate enough to find this too among the trawlings of a lifetime seems to me close to good fortune. I hope I have put it to some use.
     
    Tony Judt
New York,
May 2010

II
     
    Night
     
    I suffer from a motor neuron