Friday, June 18, 2010

Striking and sad

From a piece entitled 'Words' on Tony Judt's New York Review of Books Blog:

Today “natural” expression—in language as in art—is preferred to artifice. We unreflectively suppose that truth no less than beauty is conveyed more effectively thereby. Alexander Pope knew better. (“True Wit is Nature to Advantage drest, / What oft was Thought, but ne’er so well Exprest.” —Essay on Criticism, 1711) For many centuries in the Western tradition, how well you expressed a position corresponded closely to the credibility of your argument. Rhetorical styles might vary from the spartan to the baroque, but style itself was never a matter of indifference. And “style” was not just a well-turned sentence: poor expression belied poor thought. Confused words suggested confused ideas at best, dissimulation at worst.


...

I am more conscious of these considerations now than at any time in the past. In the grip of a neurological disorder, I am fast losing control of words even as my relationship with the world has been reduced to them. They still form with impeccable discipline and unreduced range in the silence of my thoughts—the view from inside is as rich as ever—but I can no longer convey them with ease. Vowel sounds and sibilant consonants slide out of my mouth, shapeless and inchoate even to my close collaborator. The vocal muscle, for sixty years my reliable alter ego, is failing. Communication, performance, assertion: these are now my weakest assets. Translating being into thought, thought into words, and words into communication will soon be beyond me and I shall be confined to the rhetorical landscape of my interior reflections.

Though I am now more sympathetic to those constrained to silence I remain contemptuous of garbled language. No longer free to exercise it myself, I appreciate more than ever how vital communication is to the republic: not just the means by which we live together but part of what living together means. The wealth of words in which I was raised were a public space in their own right—and properly preserved public spaces are what we so lack today. If words fall into disrepair, what will substitute? They are all we have.

Caught in the throes of a steep descent into neurological torpor, I imagine that declinism has a visceral feel for Mr. Judt that is otherwise far-removed from ourselves. Still and all, it can't be argued that fluidity, and even simple literacy, hasn't taken a nasty tumble since the liberationist consensus of the post-war years began making significant social--and especially educational--gains. I find myself very moved by what Mr. Judt wrote (and has been writing, as he lives the final hours of his communicative life), and not only because of his condition: does no one else have the palpable feeling of injury to, if not the mortal wounding of, intellectual clarity in the public domain?

1 comment:

  1. Sad and beautiful. And it's hard to rebut his point in the age of Sarah Palin, who uses her platform to talk to the world like this:

    "Schizophrenic Agenda: just last wk DC claims top priority=JOBS; then=REDUCE DEBT; now=CAP&TAX (exploit tragedy 2 kill jobs/raise taxes) Pls,FOCUS,"

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