That’s all very well, but don’t you realize that those horrors were not mere horrors. Look at it this way. You were just going to record them, but in spite of yourself you were very nearly drawn into storytelling, and if in the end you avoided its verb form, the historical past, it was only by a deliberate trick. And besides, your horror stories are more colorful, or in any case more suggestive, than the infinitely peaceful incidents of your epic tiredness?
But I’m not interested in suggestiveness. I have no desire to persuade, not even with images. I only want to remind each one of you of his own very narrative tiredness. And its visual quality will soon become apparent, at the end of this essay — right now if I’ve become tired enough in the meantime.
But quite aside from your anecdotes and fragmentary glimpses, what is the essence of the ultimate tiredness? How does it work? What good is it? Does it enable a tired person to act?
It is itself the best action, because it is in itself a beginning, a doing, a getting under way, so to speak. This getting under way is a lesson. Tiredness provides teachings that can be applied. What, you may ask, does it teach? The history of ideas used to operate with the concept of the “Thing in itself”; no longer, for an object can never be manifested “in itself,” but only in relation to me. But the tirednesses that I have in mind renew the old concept and give it meaning for me. What’s more: they give me the idea along with the concept. And better still, with the idea of the thing, I possess, almost palpably, a law: The thing not only is, but should be just as it appears at the moment. And furthermore: in such fundamental tiredness, the thing is never manifested alone but always in conjunction with other things, and even if there are not very many, they will all be together in the end. “And now even the dog with its barking says: All together!” And in conclusion: such tirednesses demand to be shared.
Why so philosophical all of a sudden?
Right — maybe I’m not tired enough. In the hour of the ultimate tiredness, there’s no room for philosophical questions. Time is also space, and space-time is also history. Being is also becoming. The other becomes I. Those two children down there before my tired eyes are also I. And the way the older sister is dragging her little brother through the room has a meaning and a value, and nothing is worth more than anything else — the rain falling on the tired man’s wrist is worth as much as his view of the people walking on the other side of the river, both are good and beautiful, and that is as it should be, now and forever — and above all it is true. How the sister-I grabs me, the brother, by the waist — that is true. And in the tired look, the relative is seen as absolute and the part as the whole.
What becomes of perception?
I have an image for the “all in one”: those seventeenth-century, for the most part Dutch floral, still lifes, in which a beetle, a snail, a bee, or a butterfly sits true to life, in the flowers, and although none of these may suspect the presence of the others, they are all there together at the moment, my moment.
Couldn’t you try to express yourself concretely and not indirectly through historical images?
Very well; then sit down — I hope you’ve become tired enough by now — with me on that stone wall at the edge of the dirt road, or better still, because we’ll be closer to the ground, squat down with me on the strip of grass in the middle of the road. See how all at once, with the help of this colored reflection, the world-map of the “all together” is revealed. Close to the earth, we are at the same time far enough away to see the rearing caterpillar, the beetle boring into the sand, and the ant hobbling over an olive at the same time as the strip of bark rolled into a figure eight before our eyes.