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.
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TJ
Tony Judt
Historian and essayist
United Kingdom · 1948–2010
Arts and letters
About
Historian of twentieth-century Europe, author of Postwar and founding director of the Remarque Institute at New York University. Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in September 2008 and effectively quadriplegic within a year, he dictated a sequence of memoir essays for the New York Review of Books and gave a small number of interviews before his death in August 2010.
11 answers
I was forced to think very hard about what it meant to be me, what it means to be a person who is only a brain. Pascal's 'thinking reed' really does capture it, because I'm just a bunch of dead muscles thinking.
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