Book review: Manifesto for the weary: can rest be radical?

Sly Saint · Dec 8, 2022

Workplace culture in a capitalist society constantly demands more of us. A new book suggests that most revolutionary response could be to just stop

Reviewed here
Rest is Resistance: A Manifsto
by Tricia Hersey (RRP: £16.99)
A History of Fatigue: From the Middle Ages to the Present
by Georges Vigarello, translated by Nancy Erber (RRP: £20)

Some of the most striking episodes in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four are simple descriptions of Winston Smith’s day. He wakes, coughing and spluttering, to the blaring of the telescreen in his decrepit flat and is immediately forced into an exhausting regime of calisthenics. After an inadequate breakfast and an equally inadequate cigarette, he has to walk down several flights of stairs, thanks to a broken lift. Lunchtime and other breaks in the working day are filled with incessant and loud propaganda. His evenings are a mixture of table tennis and hectoring lectures.

Winston’s life is one of weariness without respite. In it, Orwell captures something fundamental to the use and abuse of power: its attack on anything that smacks of rest. Whether it is within religious cults, army boot camps, torture chambers or concentration camps, the exhausted self—shorn of the energy to do anything other than comply—is a malleable self.

So does it follow that, as Tricia Hersey puts it in her new book, “rest is resistance”? Unprogrammed time may be liberating (I have always wondered whether the thing that Winston and Julia treasure most in their affair is the lying in bed after sex, rather than the sex itself). But there are limitations to rest as a form of subversion, too; all that Winston manages in the end is to carve out tiny moments of freedom before he is inevitably crushed.
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This is all heady stuff, and much of it resonated with me. I have had myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), since the early 1990s. Much of my adult life has been spent in constant (and exhausting) negotiations between my need to rest and my desire to be “productive”, “sociable” and “engaged”. While I nap daily, I probably do not do it in the same way that Hersey does; I recharge in order to “contribute” to… well, to call it grind culture probably underestimates my privilege in being able to do work that I love (such as writing). But my life is certainly relentless, sometimes grindingly so.
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https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/arts-and-books/manifesto-for-the-weary-can-rest-be-radical

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