The Pleasure of Concentration

 

I finally - probably not for the last time - started reading Thinking the Twentieth Century by Tony Judt with Timothy Snyder. That may sound suspicious: admitting two authors is generally a bad sign for a book, but here it was a necessary conceit. Tony Judt was an eminent moral historian who was struck down with ALS (the illness made famous / trivialised by 2014’s ice bucket challenge fad): Snyder is an American historian of Eastern Europe who faded in and out of Judt’s comet trail over the years and who decided that Judt’s own history, views and development over the decades needed to be captured before the inevitable, swift, end.

 

So this is a “spoken book”, a conversation between two colleagues speaking and discussing at eye level, rather than an interview between a professional journalist and a professional of something else entirely. Judt and Snyder by necessity follow in the Eastern European tradition of such transcribed conversations. I’m looking forward to discovering the thoughts and philosophies that they discuss, and to daring to measure their theories and histories against my own reality and recollections: in short, I’m looking forward to the challenge of reading it.

  

As I say, I’ve only started. In fact, I have just finished the introduction - where a single sentence made me sit up straight and realise what I’ve been trying and dismally failing to achieve lately, especially at work. It is a single sentence that could become my standard for the next few years; a sentence that got me blogging again. It comes from Timothy Snyder as he describes how the conversations with Tony Judt came to be and how, in essence, they were. This is it:

 

...the conversation was also a great source of intellectual sustenance, bringing the pleasure of concentration, the harmony of communication and the gratification of good work achieved.

 

Those three points that combined give intellectual sustenance seem so obvious now that they have been written: perhaps they come more clearly from acknowledging something that went right - indeed, I couldn’t crystallise my dissatisfaction - at work, especially - into the negatives of those points. So let’s stick to the positives, and see if we can also achieve…  

 …in all of our endeavours.