Still Life with Book Maven

Usually, book-review editors (and I loosely associate myself with that group, since I’m slouching towards making The WETA Book Studio a book-review site) try very hard not to review books from the same publisher or imprint at one time or in a row. No one wants to play favorites — not simply because it would interfere with effort towards objectivity that journalists aim for, but because there are so many interesting books out there. Why not spread the love around a bit?

Thus I was a bit loath to follow my post about Maira Kalman’s “And the Pursuit of Happiness” with one on “The Memory Chalet” by Tony Judt, since both are from The Penguin Press. However, as will become clear in a moment, I have personal reasons for doing so that have nothing whatsoever to do with publisher favoritism.

I wince, now, for is there any phrase more abjured in book reviewing than “personal reasons?” None of us really wants to read a long paragraph about how the critic’s experience at last week’s book party puts her in mind of the author’s amusing anecdote about X. I hope you’ll forgive me in this instance, and I’ll try to get my “personal reasons” out of the way quickly so that I can tell you more about Judt’s remarkable collection of what he calls feuilletons.

The historian and author Tony Judt died in August 2010. He had what the English call “motor neuron disease” and what we call “Lou Gehrig’s Disease:” Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, or ALS. (Many people know about ALS because the acclaimed British scientist Stephen Hawking has suffered from it for decades.) As Judt notes in his opening piece, this is a disease unusually cruel in its progress, because it leaves the mind entirely clear and functioning but bit by bit deprives the victim of any and all means of communication. While the course of ALS varies, in the end the person afflicted will most likely have lost the use of legs, arms, hands and fingers, mouth and speech, and often facial muscles as well. The disease is a cruel inversion of “mens sana in corpore sano,” with a “mens sana” imprisoned in a very, very ill and dysfunctional “corpore.”

I know more than a little about ALS because four years ago my own father died of a disease called Multiple System Atrophy, which is most easily described as a combination of ALS and Parkinson’s Disease. I don’t plan to dwell here on the various indignities my father endured. The “personal reasons” I’d like to share are about how, like Judt, my father began gathering conversations, memories, and information eagerly during the all-too-brief and fast months of his decline. He longed for visitors to talk with because we all knew, from research (we are nothing if not avid information gatherers in my family), that he might not be able to talk forever. My mother bought him a laptop with large keys and screen so that as long as his arms and fingers were able to, he could email and surf the web.

He was creating a sort of internal scrapbook, mining as deep as possible for things to pore over in his mind.

My father was a mechanical engineer who loved to learn but held a certain skepticism towards the humanities, believing that they could not illuminate the truths of the universe like his beloved sciences. I wish he had known Tony Judt, whose own education gifted him with the concept of the “memory palace,” a sort of brain-as-database method used by Renaissance scholars to retain huge blocks of information, from complicated grammatical systems to botanical species to mathematical theorems. When Judt was diagnosed two years ago at age sixty with ALS, his academician’s mind quickly turned to how he might cope the loss of communication to come:

“I realized, some months into the disease, that I was writing whole stories in my head in the course of the night. Doubtless I was seeking oblivion, replacing galumphing sheep with narrative complexity to comparable effect. But in the course of these little exercises, I realized that I was reconstructing — LEGO-like — interwoven segments of my own past which I had never previously thought of as related.”

Judt also realizes he has no need of a “memory palace,” but as his thoughts meander often to a particular Swiss vacation in which he was contented, he thinks: “…why not a memory chalet?” Over the course of several months, he dictated these reflections on his childhood, education, and career after turning them over at night, often sleepless in his unmoving physical state, yet free to roam through the past and make new connections between its sometimes patchy sections. 

My little attempt at writing a review of “The Memory Chalet” is already running on longer than web-savvy readers might like, and I’ll admit that I am lazy about adding pages to blog entries, but please bear with me for just a few paragraphs more so that I can share why this book is more than just a Paul Harvey-esque “The Rest of the Story” sort of thing. One of my favorite of Judt’s pieces in the book is titled “Mimetic Desire,” and it perfectly captures the way I have always felt about trains:

“As a child, I always felt uneasy and a little constrained about people, my family in particular. Solitude was bliss, but not easily obtained. Being always felt stressful — wherever I was there was something to do, someone to please, a duty to be completed, a role inadequately fulfilled, something amiss. Becoming, on the hand, was relief. I was never so happy as when I was going somewhere on my own, and the longer it took to get there, the better. Walking was pleasurable, cycling enjoyable, bus journeys fun. But the train was very heaven.”

I’d marked “Mimetic Desire” as a piece to read again — and was both pleased and moved by its connections to the final “Envoi” titled “Magic Mountains.” I won’t spoil anything more, because Judt has managed, in the midst of facing his own mortality, to help us all see something new about our humanity. That his capacious and sympathetic intellect is no longer with us is a real loss, but in constructing his “memory chalet” Tony Judt demonstrates that there is more to be discovered even when there is no more to be experienced.