As we men­tioned two weeks ago, Tony Judt, a promi­nent his­to­ri­an and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­al, has been grap­pling with ALS (oth­er­wise known as Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease) since 2008. With the dis­ease now tak­ing its toll, Judt has gone more pub­lic and start­ed pub­lish­ing with more urgency. On Mon­day, he was inter­viewed by Ter­ry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air (lis­ten below, here or on iTunes). Of the many items dis­cussed, one par­tic­u­lar­ly struck me. When Gross asked whether his­to­ry still mat­tered deeply to him, the his­to­ri­an answered: yes, but:

I think now, I’m more wor­ried about the future. The past is always going to be a mess. It’s going to be a mess because it was mess and because peo­ple are going to abuse it, get it wrong and so on. But I’m rea­son­ably con­fi­dent that with each gen­er­a­tion of his­to­ri­ans, we keep fight­ing hard to get it right again. But we could get the future very seri­ous­ly wrong, and there it’s much hard­er to get it right… I’m encoun­ter­ing the first gen­er­a­tion of young peo­ple in col­leges and schools who real­ly do not believe in the future, who don’t think not just that things will get evi­dent­ly and per­ma­nent­ly bet­ter but who feel that some­thing has gone very bad­ly wrong that they can’t quite put their fin­ger on, but that is going to spoil the world that they’re grow­ing up into.

Whether it’s cli­mate change or polit­i­cal cyn­i­cism or over­re­ac­tion or lack of reac­tion, to exter­nal chal­lenges, whether it’s ter­ror­ism or pover­ty, the sense that it’s all got out of con­trol, that they, the politi­cians and so on, media peo­ple, are nei­ther doing any­thing nor telling us the truth. That sense seems to have per­vad­ed the younger gen­er­a­tion in ways that were not true in my expe­ri­ence.

Maybe the last time that might have been true was in the 1920s, where you had the com­bi­na­tion of shock and anger from World War I, the begin­nings of eco­nom­ic depres­sion and the ter­ri­fy­ing real­iza­tion that there might very well be a World War II. I don’t think we’re on the edge of World War III or IV. But I do think that we are on the edge of a ter­ri­fy­ing world. That’s why I wrote the book [Ill Fares the Land].

The first chap­ter of Ill Fares the Land is now avail­able (for free) on The New York Times web­site, and it will give you a quick feel for the issues that Judt thinks we need to con­front. The com­plete Fresh Air inter­view ranges much more broad­ly, going into Judt’s per­son­al expe­ri­ence with ALS, and I’d encour­age you to give it your time. (Stream below.) Also please vis­it Move For ALS to con­tribute to a new cam­paign affil­i­at­ed with Tony Judt to fund ALS research.

Dur­ing the past decade, Tony Judt emerged as one of Amer­i­ca’s lead­ing pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als. He’s com­bat­ive, often con­tro­ver­sial (espe­cial­ly when talk­ing about Israel), and some­times dis­liked. But he’s tak­en seri­ous­ly. And many have had noth­ing but sheer praise for his mas­ter work, Post­war: A His­to­ry of Europe Since 1945. The NYU his­to­ri­an had built up a career that many envied. But then things start­ed going wrong … phys­i­cal­ly, not intel­lec­tu­al­ly. In 2008, Judt was diag­nosed with ALS, or Lou Gehrig’s dis­ease. And he made his diag­no­sis wide­ly known ear­li­er this year, when he pub­lished an essay, “Night,” in The New York Review of Books. The arti­cle is short, but it brings you right inside his dai­ly expe­ri­ence. He writes:

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. It is not as though you lose the desire to stretch, to bend, to stand or lie or run or even exer­cise. But when the urge comes over you there is nothing—nothing—that you can do except seek some tiny sub­sti­tute or else find a way to sup­press the thought and the accom­pa­ny­ing mus­cle mem­o­ry.

But then comes the night. … 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. I am then cov­ered, my hands placed out­side the blan­ket to afford me the illu­sion of mobil­i­ty but wrapped nonethe­less since—like the rest of me—they now suf­fer from a per­ma­nent sen­sa­tion of cold. I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hair­line to toe; the Bi-Pap breath­ing device in my nose is adjust­ed to a nec­es­sar­i­ly uncom­fort­able lev­el of tight­ness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glass­es are removed…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.

This expe­ri­ence has­n’t slowed down Judt a bit. In fact, quite the oppo­site, Judt has been ramp­ing up his pub­li­ca­tions, prov­ing even more pro­lif­ic than before. (His lat­est book, Ill Fares the Land, will be pub­lished this week.) Judt’s bat­tle with ALS and his sense of intel­lec­tu­al urgency get dis­cussed in the lat­est edi­tion of New York Mag­a­zine. It’s a piece well worth read­ing. So also is the large pro­file that ran in The Chron­i­cle of High­er Edu­ca­tion in Jan­u­ary. Above we fea­ture an inter­view with Judt post­ed by The Guardian.