Peter Handke published the Versuch über die Müdigkeit in 1989, a book you could hold in one hand and read in an afternoon, though you should not. It is the first of his slim Versuche, essays in the older sense, patient enough to sit with a small word until it stops being small. His word here is Müdigkeit — tiredness — a subject his century had handed over almost entirely to medicine, to management, and to the diagnostic murmur of the wellness industries.
He begins by refusing that whole vocabulary. There is not, he says, one tiredness. There are many, and they belong to different regions of the soul. There is the church tiredness of the child, guilty and warping. There is the solitary room tiredness of a student at the edge of a strange city, which slides toward paralysis. There is the couple tiredness that falls between two people like a change of weather and turns even shared light into two separate isolations. There is the slave tiredness of underpaid labour, which cannot be slept off, because it has already eaten the day beneath the day.
These bad tirednesses, he insists, narrow the world. They shrink the eye, deform the voice, cut the person off from any shared form. Against them Handke sets a second family of tirednesses, harder to describe because our age barely produces them: the tirednesses that open rather than close.
He remembers his village, the men after the threshing, sitting quietly in the same exhaustion, no one presiding, no one lonely. He remembers a crew of carpenters, taking their lunch on the beams, tired without hierarchy, joking without cruelty, listening without effort. He calls this a small, temporary people of the tired, a Volk der Müdigkeit, brought into shape by a common measure. It is not, he is careful to say, a metaphor for society. It is the residue of the older intuition that shared labour and shared depletion once produced a kind of civic gentleness no political programme has since matched.
Then he moves higher. He describes a tiredness after a night flight arriving in New York, after long looking at Poussin in Edinburgh, after walking through an empty Friulian plain, in which the world simply falls into form. The self, so exhausting to carry, is briefly set down. Strangers greet him, mistaking him for someone they know. Idiots and animals recognise him. The scene organises itself, without effort, into what he calls an epic. He writes the line I return to whenever the noise of the age begins to grate:
“Dank meiner Müdigkeit wurde die Welt ihre Namen los und groß.”
Thanks to my tiredness, the world lost its names and became large.
Read that sentence twice. It is the whole book. What ordinarily happens is the opposite: we are alert, tense, well-caffeinated, and the world contracts to the little file of things we intend to do to it. We name everything and everything shrinks. Handke discovers that a certain kind of exhaustion loosens the grip of naming. The ego, the ceaseless Ich-Selbst, is, as he puts it, taken away as if by miracle. What remains looks at the world with slower, undefended eyes, and the world, without being asked, begins to arrange itself into meaning.
This is why the book matters now, more than in 1989, when Handke could still assume a reader who had known real physical work, real hunger, real long distance on foot. We have industrialised the removal of exactly the conditions his good tiredness required. We have engineered the day so that no one need ever arrive at the end of themselves. We have replaced fatigue with stimulation, and stimulation with the frictionless scroll. And we have quietly forgotten what the older cultures knew, and what the Chinese literati and the desert fathers knew, and what any carpenter in Handke’s village still knew: that the deepest apprehension of the world requires the self to first grow briefly weak.
He is not a moralist about this. He does not prescribe. He describes, with an almost embarrassing care, the exact texture of the good tirednesses, so that a reader who has never known them might at least recognise the shape of what has been taken away. He notes that they arrive most easily to those who have travelled far, worked long, gone hungry, missed sleep, walked out of their own familiarity. And he notes, more sadly, that they cannot be manufactured. One cannot go looking for good tiredness. It comes, if it comes, when the ego has finally stopped pretending to be in charge.
I keep this book near my chair. It is one of the very few modern works I trust to answer the anxiety of overproduction without becoming lazy about it. Handke is not against work; he is against the world of total work, in which even our rest is scored and even our attention is monetised. His counter-proposal is quieter than any manifesto. Let yourself, on occasion, be properly tired. Not exhausted, not depleted, not broken — tired in the older sense, the sense a whole village once shared without needing to name it. Then look up. You will find the world, freed from its endless nomenclature, has grown larger without you having to enlarge it.
He ends the book with a small, almost domestic hope. He imagines a Pentecost of the tired: a whole people momentarily unhurried, unarmed, quietly attentive, capable at last of receiving one another. It is the mildest political vision anyone wrote in the late twentieth century. It is also, if you have been paying attention, the only one still available to us.
On this shelf since April; only now written down.