What I Learned Along the Way: Memory, Education and the Struggle for the Future

Abstract

Turning 83 has made me think less about age than about memory—about the people who shaped me, the worlds that have disappeared, and the obligation to carry something of them into the future. Many of the intellectuals who profoundly influenced my thinking are now gone. Their absence has made me increasingly aware that an intellectual life is never simply one's own. We inherit languages, questions, acts of courage, friendships, arguments, and examples from others. What matters is what we do with that inheritance—those increasingly powerful landmarks of a life’s journey.

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At this stage of my life, I have little interest in withdrawal or, as Bob Dylan put it, simply following the parade. I want to continue writing, teaching, learning from young people, and participating in struggles that reach beyond my own lifetime. Institutions may fail us. Political circumstances may become increasingly cruel. Friends and teachers eventually leave us. But the obligation to resist injustice, enlarge the possibilities of democracy, and keep alive the capacity to imagine otherwise does not disappear.

If our work does not reach into the future, what is the point?