WORK

Fatigue is one of the most interesting things in the world to think about. It’s like jealousy, or lying, or fear. It’s like one of those impure things that you keep well hidden. Like all those things, it makes you touch the ground. The first tired face you see in life is your mother’s, a face exhausted by solitude. Children in their early years bring dreams, laughter, and especially fatigue, fatigue before anything else. Nights stripped bare, overwhelming happiness. From the very start, fatigue knocks on two sacred doors in life: love and sleep. It wears love down like water over a stone; it floods sleep like water upon water. Fatigue is sleep’s barbaric intrusion into love, the flame of sleep over acres of love. Fatigue is like a bad mother, one who no longer gets up in the night to comfort and delight us with her voice or give us our share of joy in her arms. And you can tell tired people. You can tell them by the way they incessantly do things. The way they make it impossible for any restfulness to reach them, or any silence of love. Tired people are good at business, they build houses, pursue careers. To flee their fatigue they do all these things, and in fleeing they submit to fatigue. Their time is lacking in time. Everything they do more and more of, they do less and less of. Their lives are lacking in life. There is a glass window between one self and the other. They walk alongside that window incessantly. You can see the fatigue in their features, in their hands, and behind their words. Fatigue is in them like nostalgia, like an impossible desire.

—Christian Bobin (trans. by Alison Anderson)
—from “May He Be Left in Peace”
—found in A Little Party Dress: Lyric Essays

WORD(S)

tristesse. noun. Sadness, grief, a state of melancholy sadness.

“Nature…too much by half for man in the picture, and so giving a certain tristesse.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)

“We are denied, my love, their fine tristesse
And bittersweet regrets, and cannot share
The frequent vistas of their large despair,
Where love and all are swept to nothingness”
(Richard Wilbur)

“On occasion, although Carol had never seen fit to notice, Dan had leaked warm tears during this post-coital tristesse.” (Will Self)

“‘On sadness’ shows Montaigne’s concern with ecstasies produced by strong emotions and his impatience with merely fashionable tristesse which sought to ape the abstracted, pensive depths of melancholy genius (as portrayed, for example, by Dürer).” (M.A. Screech)

“The robot let out a long heartfelt sigh of impassioned tristesse and sank reluctantly away from the ceiling.” (Douglas Adams)

WEB

1. ▶ Alive Inside is a documentary film about music and memory featuring Dan Cohen, who works to get iPods into the hands—and music into the ears—of patients suffering memory loss. After watching it, blogger Fresca asks a simple and fascinating question: “What Songs Will We Remember After We Forget Our Names?”

2. “The Taser Photoshoot: Portraits of People’s Faces When Hit With A Stun Gun”. The portraits are funny and delightful…as is the slow-motion video.

3. “This pepper tastes like babies.” What happens when a four year-old reviews the ultra chic French Laundry restaurant is amusing. But the comments thread is where the party’s at.

4. Next time you are in Portland, Oregon, visit Mill Ends Park, the smallest park in the world.

5. Today in 1978, Cardinal Albino Luciani of Venice is elected Pope, taking the name Pope John Paul I. He died just 33 days later, making him the center of the most recent “Year of Three Popes” (it had last happened in 1605). Believe it or not, no less than 10 Popes had shorter reigns than John Paul I.

REPRISES/RESPONSES/REJOINDERS/RIPOSTES

Reader F. appreciated seeing James Wright’s poem “A Blessing” make an appearance:

“Thank you, thank you, for posting this old favorite of mine. I used to give a workshop for teachers entitled ”Breaking into Blossom.“ Of course I began (and ended) with this lovely poem. In between, everyone wrote their own breaking into blossom poem. I hadn’t thought of it as a wedding poem, but will send it to two friends who got married yesterday (after all these years when they couldn’t).”

I welcome comments, suggestions, thoughts, feedback and all manner of what-have-you. Just press ‘Reply’ or email to: clippings@katexic.com.

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