Afterlife
Terry Gross, the host of NPR’s Fresh Air radio show, interviewed Tony Judt yesterday. He is a historian and a professor, and has been living with ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease) for the last few years.
Photo credit: Salon van Sisyphus (in Dutch)
I enjoy listening to “interesting” voices on the radio – somehow it is easier to concentrate on what a person is saying if they sound different from the prescribed neutral mid-western accent of most TV anchors. Mr. Judt’s voice, strained from the disease and accented by a respiration machine is certainly an interesting voice; but his thoughtfulness, wisdom and the fluency of his explanations were amazing and would have held my attention in any voice. He had a great answer to each of Terry’s questions, and seemed to have thought through all these answers over the years. One of the most compelling was his answer to Terry’s question about whether becoming sick had changed his faith in God.
“I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe in a single or multiple godhead. I respect people who do, but I don’t believe it myself. But there’s a big ‘but’ which enters in here. I am much more conscious than I ever was — for obvious reasons — on what it will mean to people left behind once I’m dead. It won’t mean anything for me. But it will mean a lot to them. It’s important to them — by which I mean my children or my wife or my very close friends — that some spirit of me is in a positive way present in their lives, in their heads, in their imaginations and so on. So [in] one curious way I’ve come to believe in the afterlife — as a place where I still have moral responsibilities, just as I do in this life — except that I can only exercise them before I get there. Once I get there, it will be too late. So, no God. No organized religion. But a developing sense that there’s something bigger than the world we live in, including after we die, and we have responsibilities in that world.”
Amen to that.