The Jukebox And Other Essays On Storytelling

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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, in the years of my first loves, then more than ever. Once during midnight Mass, sitting with his family in the densely crowded, dazzlingly bright village church, the child breathed in the smell of wax and woolen cloth and was overcome by a tiredness that struck with the force of a sickness.

What kind of sickness?

The kind that is said to be “nasty” or “insidious”—for this was a nasty, insidious tiredness. It denatured the world around me, transforming my fellow churchgoers into felt-and-loden dolls that were hemming me in, transforming the resplendently decorated altar in the hazy distance into a torture chamber enhanced by the confused rituals and formulas of the servers, and the sick, tired child himself into a grotesque elephant-headed figure, as heavy and dry-eyed and thick-skinned as that animal. My tiredness removed me from the substance of the world, in the event the winter world of snowy air and solitary sled rides under the stars at night, after the other children had gradually disappeared into their houses, far beyond the fringes of the village, alone, winged with enthusiasm: utterly present, in the stillness, in the whirring of the air, in the blueness of the ice that was forming on the road —“it tingles” is what we used to say of that pleasant cold. But there in the church the child, held fast by tiredness as in the grip of an Iron Maiden, experienced a very different kind of cold, so much so that in the very midst of the Mass he begged to go home, which just then meant no more than “out.” Once again I had spoiled one of my parents’ rare opportunities, becoming rarer as the old customs died out, for social contact with the neighbors.

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