The Memory Chalet - By Tony Judt Page 0,1

wooden constructions where I have slept over the years. We only stayed there for ten days or so, and I have returned on just one brief occasion. But I can describe even today the intimate style of the place.

There were few excrescences of indulgence: you entered on a mezzanine level separating a small basement area from the business rooms of the main floor—the point of this mezzanine being to segregate the dripping paraphernalia of outdoor sport (skis, boots, sticks, jackets, sleds, etc.) from the cozy, dry ambiance of the public rooms. The latter, set to both sides of the reception desk, had large, attractive windows giving on to the main road of the village and the steep gorges surrounding it. Behind them in turn were the kitchens and other service spaces, obscured by a broad and unusually steep staircase leading to the bedroom floor.

The latter divided neatly and perhaps intentionally into the better-furnished sleeping accommodation to the left and the smaller, single, waterless rooms farther along, leading in their turn to a narrow set of steps culminating in an attic floor preserved for employees (except at the height of the season). I have not checked, but I doubt whether there were more than twelve rooms for rent, in addition to the three public areas and the common spaces surrounding them. This was a small hotel for small families of modest means, set in an unpretentious village with no ambitions above its geographical station in life. There must be ten thousand such hostelries in Switzerland: I just happen to have a near-perfect visual recollection of one of them.

Except as a pleasant reminder of contented memories, I doubt whether I gave the Chesières chalet a second thought for much of the ensuing fifty years. And yet when I was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in 2008 and quickly came to understand that I would most likely not travel again—indeed, would be very fortunate if I were even in a position to write about my travels—it was the Chesières hotel that came insistently to mind. Why?

The salient quality of this particular neurodegenerative disorder is that it leaves your mind clear to reflect upon past, present, and future, but steadily deprives you of any means of converting those reflections into words. First you can no longer write independently, requiring either an assistant or a machine in order to record your thoughts. Then your legs fail and you cannot take in new experiences, except at the cost of such logistical complexity that the mere fact of mobility becomes the object of attention rather than the benefits that mobility itself can confer.

Next you begin to lose your voice: not just in the metaphorical sense of having to speak through assorted mechanical or human intermediaries, but quite literally in that the diaphragm muscles can no longer pump sufficient air across your vocal cords to furnish them with the variety of pressure required to express meaningful sound. By this point you are almost certainly quadriplegic and condemned to long hours of silent immobility, whether or not in the presence of others.

For someone wishing to remain a communicator of words and concepts, this poses an unusual challenge. Gone is the yellow pad, with its now useless pencil. Gone the refreshing walk in the park or workout in the gym, where ideas and sequences fall into place as if by natural selection. Gone too are productive exchanges with close friends—even at the midpoint of decline from ALS, the victim is usually thinking far faster than he can form words, so that conversation itself becomes partial, frustrating, and ultimately self-defeating.

I think I came across the answer to this dilemma quite by chance. I realized, some months into the disease, that I was writing whole stories in my head in the course of the night. Doubtless I was seeking oblivion, replacing galumphing sheep with narrative complexity to comparable effect. But in the course of these little exercises, I realized that I was reconstructing—LEGO-like—interwoven segments of my own past which I had never previously thought of as related. This in itself was no great achievement: the streams of consciousness that would carry me from a steam engine to my German language class, from the carefully constructed route lines of London’s country buses to the history of interwar town planning—were easy enough to furrow and thence follow in all manner of interesting directions. But how should I recapture those half-buried tracks the following day?

It was here that nostalgic recollections of happier days spent