Tony Judt loved trains. Late in life when he was dreadfully ill with ALS he had long conversations with Timothy Snyder, which produced the collaboration the forthcoming Thinking the Twentieth Century, a century characterized by certainties abandoned and defeated. Judt told Snyder that "one of the sadnesses of his illness was that he would never again find himself on a railway platform, uncertain of destination but certain of progress." Ah that certainty again. Trains produce wonderful metaphors. They contain an ambiguity that gives them depth, as in Muddy Waters' Two Trains Running - neither one going my way.Snyder's New York Review post on Tony Judt and Thinking the Twentieth Century is HERE
