A History of Fatigue
Also: Judith Butler’s permanent diaspora, crusading women, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s most controversial book, and more.
My wife and I visited our daughter and son-in-law in Victoria, British Columbia over spring break last month, and I have been tired ever since we arrived back home (and not just because we had to spend most of the night in Vancouver and most of the following day in Toronto because of delays). I am not exhausted. I am still able to write and teach. But I always feel like could take a nap. I am trying to get back into fair cycling shape and could barely do 30 minutes on the bike that first week back.
Thankfully, things are getting better. I was able to do a serious workout last week and feel less tired than before, but a low-grade felling of fatigue remains. I talked to my doctor about it the other day—he’s looking at my blood!—but it’s such a subjective thing, I almost didn’t. Am I really tired, or am I just telling myself I am? Is this a new feeling, or one I simply haven’t noticed before? Maybe I’m just depressed! Or getting old! Maybe you can relate.
In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane reviews a new book on that nebulous thing called fatigue. What is it? What causes it? Can we ever be rid of it? These, it turns out, are old questions:
In 1698, the Duc de Berry had a nosebleed. This calamity was brought on by his “overheating” during a partridge hunt. Three hundred and nineteen years later, the writer Anaïs Vanel quit her editing job and went surfing. What links this unlikely couple? Well, both of them earn a mention in A History of Fatigue (Polity), a new book by Georges Vigarello, translated by Nancy Erber. The book sets out to examine, in frankly draining detail, the many ways in which humans, often against their will, end up thoroughly pooped.
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