Thursday, March 8, 2012

TONY JUDT'S FINAL VICTORY

The lateTony Judt is an intellectual, political, and spiritual hero of mine...a Mensch of the first order.  So, too, now, is his wife Jennifer Homans who wrote this moving NY Review of Books essay about his last book and his last days:
 
 
I have no doubt that, had he lived, he would today be a great source of the sort of intellectual rigor and moral outrage deployed on behalf of Occupy.  Jennifer agrees.  As she wrote in this essay:
 
"Tony had always been a forthright critic of social injustice; now he had zero tolerance. Not zero tolerance for halfway solutions—even a halfway solution is a solution—but zero tolerance for political deception and intellectual dishonesty. He acquired, in a way, the wisdom of a child: Why aren't people angrier? Some were, of course, but Tony didn't live to see the Arab Spring or Occupy Wall Street. He would have taken a probing and active interest in both."
 
But, come to think of it, Tony is still reaching out to us "across the divide separating the living from the ever after."  Just read his Ill Fares the Land and that final book, Thinking the Twentieth Century.  On their pages you will hear his strong voice of outrage and engagement.
 
I'm also looking forward to the April release of The Path to Hope by Stephane Hessel and Edgar Morin, a follow-on to Hessel's Indignez-vous! (Time for Outrage).  The latter inspired my engagement with Occupy.
 
my reading list is growing.  I hope yours is also.
 
 
"In the spring there will be growth." - Chance the Gardener 
 

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