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Now yes, let's embrace tiredness

2020-10-23T00:45:52.254Z


The pandemic and teleworking cause exhaustion, according to the WHO, the symptom is not new, the literature has narrated how this society of tired men and women has been forged


Working tires

, Cesare Pavese titled one of his most famous poems, but the truth is that not working for one reason or another or teleworking is also tiresome, as the World Health Organization (WHO) maintains in its latest report, when warning of that 60% of Europeans show symptoms of apathy and lack of motivation caused by the “immense sacrifices” of recent months: as the director of the organization, Hans Kluge, stated at a press conference, “the cost has been extraordinary and has exhausted us everyone, wherever we live and whatever we do ”.

These are not new symptoms, however: ten years ago the German philosopher Byung-Chul Han spoke for the first time of a "society of fatigue" whose most explicit manifestation would be the increase in diseases such as depression, attention deficit and

burnout. out

, all of them, reactions to the acceleration of information flows and an excessive demand for productivity: in a society articulated around an insufficient labor market whose worst features have radicalized the pandemic, we are all "tired of the universe and of society" and we are only "rich in anxiety", as Fernando Pessoa wrote.

"Fatigue without reward is torture," defined Kerlynne Ferrer, echoing the discomfort produced by the type of non-manual work and without a clear purpose that, unfortunately, constitutes the main activity of millions of people at this time.

John Lennon, one of the great "tired" of 20th century music, admitted, for his part, in his song

A Hard Day's Night

that he had worked "all day like a dog" and should be "sleeping like a log", In

I'm Only Sleeping he

asked "please don't wake me up, don't shake me / Leave me where I am / I'm just sleeping" and in

I'm So Tired he

acknowledged that, although he was "very tired" he was going to light another cigarette, blaming I pass Sir Walter Raleigh, who made the popularization of tobacco in Britain possible, by habit.

There is still much to say about fatigue, as the French historian and sociologist Georges Vigarello recalls in his new book,

Historia de la fatigue

(Seuil);

In it, Vigarello argues that fatigue and fatigue are not ahistorical terms: from the Middle Ages to the present day, both have seen modified the symptoms by which they are recognized, the causes attributed to them, the terms with which they are called , the remedies given to them and the way they are perceived by individuals and by society, for example giving greater importance to the “overwork” of men to the detriment of women, whose exhaustion was reduced for decades to a simple “neurasthenia”, a disease that the German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin once defined as “exhaustion without fatigue and fatigue without exhaustion”.

History of Fatigue

is a tremendously stimulating book, despite its subject: it presents the Western subject as a kind of Sisyphus condemned to push a huge boulder uphill which, upon reaching the top, slips out of his hands and falls, forcing him to push him again and again until the end of time.

Perhaps Sisyphus has been condemned to that interminable and useless task for having committed an infidelity: other sources maintain that it could have been for assaulting the travelers;

However, Albert Camus, who wrote one of his best books about him (

The Myth of Sisyphus

, 1942), is not so interested in the cause of the punishment as in the possibility of reasoning why Sisyphus, like the rest of us, can feel for an instant, despite his condemnation, something akin to happiness.

And it is precisely in pursuit of that happiness, or something more or less similar, that the protagonist of

My Year of Rest and Relaxation

by Ottessa Moshfegh (2018) takes refuge in chemically induced sleep, in a fable about the sleep paradox to wake up from the narcissistic nightmare.

Unlike the protagonist of Moshfegh's book, the Austrian writer Peter Handke learned not to fear fatigue, in his case, a few years earlier: in March 1989, upon returning from a world tour, Handke took refuge in the Jaen town of Linares and wrote his

Essay on Fatigue

, in which he confronted his personal exhaustion and negative visions around fatigue with the possibility that it is an inescapable part of a life fully realized: for Handke, fatigue can be a source of inspiration that allows us to understand what to put aside.

Like the Bartleby in Hermann Melville's story (1853), who "would rather not do it" and who is cornered by his radical refusal until his death;

like practically all of Samuel Beckett's characters;

like the young student in

Georges Perec's

A Man Who Sleeps

(1967), who gives up taking an exam one morning and then abandons himself in an exercise in unsatisfactory and ultimately useless detachment;

like good part of the English novels of the last Postwar period;

like the Oblomov in Ivan Goncharov's novel of the same name (1859), the little Russian aristocrat whose good intentions are repeatedly frustrated by laziness, a perhaps excessive passion for good food, and the inevitable nap afterwards and a profound weariness of the realities of existence;

as Oblomov's son, who played the Irish comedian extraordinary Spike Milligan on stage in 1965;

Like the characters of the German writer Wilhelm Genazino, Handke glimpses in exhaustion the transformative potential that is often denied him.

Naturally, his is not the indolence of the great dreamers of our culture:

Washington Irving's

Rip Van Winkle

, Charles Perrault's Sleeping Beauty, the Brothers Grimm and Walt Disney, Lewis Carroll's Alice, Juliet in the Presence of Romeo, the sleeping beauties of Stephen King, the sleeping astronauts who deliberately or mistakenly wake up in hundreds of science fiction films and books, the grandfather of

The Simpsons

.

As for Charles Baudelaire, whose boredom is a form of resistance to the imperatives of industrial society, for Handke, to accept fatigue is to move in the direction of a transformation of society that benefits from the possibility of, in Byung's words -Chul Han, "make use of the unused", of what is considered irrelevant.

For Vigarello, "fatigue has become a way of being, a constant and banal state".

The pandemic, within the framework of which the publication of the book acquires an added meaning, has ratified the permanent nature of this state, which also presides over the choices of leisure in confinement, since, as is evident, the products of the cultural industry are all similar despite their appearance of novelty and variety: ultimately, and as shown (among others) by the Netflix algorithm, we are only allowed to choose between the same products.

"You have already played / (I think) / And broken the toys you liked the most / And now you are a little tired / Tired of things that break, and ... / Just tired / I am too," wrote the American poet EE Cummings;

Those things that break are, however, in this context, a society that fantasizes about unlimited growth of economic production within the framework of a physical life that is limited by definition.

Abandoning preconceptions around these issues could take a lifetime, and may not have time to do so, given accelerating climate change, the depletion of natural resources, and the loss of biodiversity;

But perhaps it is still possible, and Han has a plan for it, a project to reconquer enthusiasm that consists, among other things, in reading and, especially, in the theater, the type of artistic experience in which the simultaneity of the time of the narrated and the time of the lived.

One would like to sleep and wake up in a long time, ideally, less exhausted: but perhaps the pandemic is "the" moment to finally embrace the fatigue and try to understand it.

Source: elparis

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