The Memory Chalet

Tony Judt-The Memory Chalet 1948-2010 (The year this last book was published)

"To be blunt, what distinguishes me from many others who--have comparable memories is that I have a variety of uses to which I can put them. For this alone I consider myself a 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 the analytically disposed mind."

"My nights are intriguing, but I could do without them."

"If there is something distinctive about my version of contemporary European history in Postwar, it is--I believe--the subliminal emphasis on space: a sense of regions, distances, differences, and contrasts within the limited frame of one small subcontinent. I think I came to that sense of space by staring aimlessly ot of train windows."

"But proximity can be delusory: sometimes it is better to share with your neighbors a mutually articulated sense of the foreign. For this we require a journey: a passage in time and space in which to register symbols and intimations of change and difference--border police, foreign languages, alien food."

"there is nothing noble about unskilled physical work. It is hard and dirty and mostly unrewarding; the incentive to avoid supervision, cut corners, and do the minimum is rational and irresistible."

"We remain in thrall to the industrial-era notion that our work defines us: but this is palpably untrue for the overwhelming majority of people today...The majority of jobs are tedious: they neither enrich nor sustain...well-paid pundits are quick to lecture "welfare queens" on the moral turpitude of economic dependence, the impropriety of public benefits, and the virtues of hard work. They should try it some time."

"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...Talking, it seemed to me, was the point of adult existence. I have never lost that sense."

On America "It is an old-new land engaged in perennial self-discovery (usually at other's expense): an empire sheathed in preindustrial myths, dangerous and innocent."

"But "the market" --like "dialectical materialism" is just an abstraction: at once ultra-rational (its argument trumps all) and the acme of unreason (it is not open to question). It has its true believers--mediocre thinkers by contrast with the founding fathers, but influential withal; its fellow travelers--who may privately doubt the claims of the dogma but see no alternative to preaching it; and its victims, many of whom in the US have dutifully swallowed their pill and proudly proclaim the virtues of a doctrine whose benefits they will never see."

(Identity studies)

"The shortcomings of all these para-academic programs is not that they concentrate on a given ethnic or geographical minority; it is that they encourage members of that minority to study themselves--thereby simultaneously negating the goals of a liberal education and reinforcing the sectarian and ghetto mentalities they purport to undermine."

"...more than two centuries after Samuel Johnson first made the point, patriotism--as anyone who passed the last decade in America can testify--is still the last refuge of the scoundrel."

"I have never thought of myself as a rooted person. We are born by chance in one town rather than another and pass through various temporary homes in the course of our vagrant lives--at least that is how it has been for me. Most places hold mixed memories: I cannot think of Cambridge or Paris or Oxford or New York without recalling a kaleidoscope of encounters and experiences. How I remember them varies with my mood. But Murren never changes. Nothing ever went wrong there.

There is a path of sorts that accompanies Murren's pocket railway. Halfway along, a little cafe--the only stop on the line--serves the usual run of Swiss wayside fare. Ahead, the mountain falls steeply away into the first valley below. Behind, you can clamber up to the summer barns with the cows and goats and shepherds. Or you can just wait for the next train: punctual, predictable, and precise to the second. Nothing happens: it is the happiest place in the world. We cannot choose where we start out in life, but we may finish where we will. I know where I shall be: going nowhere in particular on that little train, forever and ever."