Thursday, 10 October 2019

'In tones of examination-oriented pedantry...!'

Peter Handke | Nobel Laureate 2019

Even while he was still a student, Peter Handke (the newest Nobel Laureate in Literature, 2019) had started out on his tryst with the pen, writing his heart out every now and then! I restate the phrase: ‘Even when he was still a student!’ Enough motivation and inspiration for our students to wield the magic wand! 

There has been no turning back for Peter and his muse ever since! And now with the prestigious Nobel Prize in his kitty, his way with words - creating worlds through words - has been such a rewarding one, both to his art and to his heart as well!


Peter Handke is an Austrian novelist, playwright and translator.

In this essay, Handke uses the  ‘question-and-answer’ dialogue-mode, to highlight the various types of fatigue! This post wishes to highlight in particular the tiredness and fatigue of our pavapetta student in class, which I guess would be so reminiscent of our own student days! 

So here goes some excerpts for yall - 

Essay On Tiredness

In the past I knew tiredness only as something to be feared.

When in the past?

In my childhood, in my so-called student days!

Was the tiredness of your student days similar?

No. The guilt feelings were gone.

In lecture halls, on the contrary, my tiredness made me angry and rebellious. Ordinarily, it was not so much the foul air, or being cooped up with hundreds of other students, as the lecturers’ lack of interest in what was supposed to be their subject.

Never since then have I encountered a group of people so uninspired by what they were doing as those university professors and instructors; any bank teller counting out notes that don’t even belong to him, any road repairer working in the overheated air between the sun overhead and the tar boiler down below seemed more inspired.

Stuffed shirts, whose voices never vibrated with the astonishment (that a good teacher’s subject arouses in him), with enthusiasm, with tenderness, with self-doubt, anger, indignation, or awareness of their own ignorance, but droned incessantly on, intoned—needless to say not in the deep chest tones of Homer, but in tones of examination-oriented pedantry, interspersed now and then with a facetious undercurrent or a malicious allusion addressed to those in the know, while outside the windows green went blue and finally darkened, until the student’s tiredness turned to irritation and his irritation to rage.

And again as in childhood that feeling of “Let me out! Away from the lot of you in here!” But where to? Home, as in childhood? But there in my rented room, a new tiredness unknown in my childhood was to be dreaded: the tiredness of being alone in a rented room on the outskirts; solitary tiredness.

Details of the Book - 

The Jukebox & Other Essays on Storytelling, Published by Farrar Straus & Giroux, 1994.

image: babeliodotcom

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