"As a theme, fatigue is so extensive, and so intrinsic to the fact of being alive, that demarcating where it begins or ends is no simple task."

"One can imagine a Borgesian fable in which a fatiguologist, bent upon covering every aspect of the topic, dies of sheer inanition with the project incomplete. The more encyclopedic the mission, the stricter the boundaries that need to be set; if you’re expecting 'A History of Fatigue' to begin with the Iliad—whose protagonists are pre-wiped, having battled for nine years before the action of the poem gets under way—you are doomed to disappointment. Nothing about the ancient world, it would seem, appeals to Vigarello. He doubtless believes that everyone back then was brimming with juice and zip, and that if Achilles harried Hector three times around the walls of Troy it’s because both guys needed the exercise."

Writes Anthony Lane, "The Exhausting History of Fatigue Having too much to do can be tiring; having nothing to do may be worse" (The New Yorker). Lane does not like the book, "A History of Fatigue" by Georges Vigarello, but I enjoyed the review, and fatigue is an interesting subject.

And I learned a word... or, at least, "inanition" seems like a new word to me. It is — according to the OED — "The action or process of emptying; the condition of being empty; spec. the exhausted condition resulting from want or insufficiency of nourishment."

I checked the 19-year history of this blog, and "inanition" did appear once. It was in a quote from... you could almost guess and have a good shot at getting it right...

George Will: "America, which is entertaining itself to inanition, has never experienced a scarcity of entertainment."