320
PARTISAN REVIEW
until the day he snores his last, nothing in
all
the world will succeed
in making him tired, until perhaps his finaJ punishment, for which he
himself may secretly yearn. My entire country is alive with bouncy
indefatigables of this breed, among them its so-called leaders; instead
of joining the army of tiredness for so much as one moment, a
swarming mob of habitual criminals and their accomplices, very
different from those described above, of elderly, but untiring mass
murderers of both sexes, who throughout the country have secreted a
new generation of equally tireless young fellows, who even now are
training the grandchildren of the senior murderers to be secret-police
agents with the result that in this contemptible majority-country,
everyone will remain alone with his tiredness until the end of our
political history.
Tiredness, in all cases, involves overcoming a hardship; as an ideal
state it creates an openness, "making room for an epic that will
encompass all beings ...." Writing "about" tiredness turns out to be
just the kind of hardship that leads toward that state: to the next, the
real story? [n the last exchange of tiredness between writer and his
questioning self, the image of a jukebox, remembered in the Adalusian
town of Linares, presents itself
The only jukebox the writer actually sees while working on his
piece about it is in an old English film shown in a theater in Soria, the
small town in the Castilian highlands where he had settled in the dead of
winter to pursue his work. The search around town for "the real thing"
yielded one more, albeit concrete picture among the fragments of many
others, retrieved from memory, of jukebox haunts and corresponding
human habitats at home and abroad: in housing developments rather
than city centers, in ferry stations as opposed to ocean resorts from
England to Greece, to Alaska and Japan. These are laid out carefully,
like archeological finds, in the wintery light of the sparse Castilian land–
and cityscapes where he took his long habitual walks before and after
writing.
The year happened to be 1989, and as Eastern Europe was opening
up, the writer had been pushing West from his own Eastern roots in his
beloved former Yugoslavia across his native continent, a strange sort of
brave New Old World pioneer, a post-Berlin Wall Don Quixote
chasing jukeboxes in the fragile dawn of a new Utopia, trailed by news
of the Ceaucescus' executions. A remembered Christmas night in an
Alaskan bar takes him across the Atlantic and the continent of every
European child's dream of the "West" to the westernmost outpost,
propelled by an imagination that had first been swept on the waves of
