About the author
Miguel Ángel Hernández is a Spanish writer, art historian and curator best known for his fiction, including the novels Intento de escapada (2013), which won the Premio Ciudad Alcalá de Narrativa and was translated into five languages, and El instante de peligro (2015), which was a finalist for the Premio Herralde de Novela. El dolor de los demás (2018) was selected among the books of the year by El País and The New York Times en Español. His latest novel is Anoxia (2023).
About the book
Associated with laziness and idleness, the siesta contravenes one of the fundamental principles of the modern world: the productive drive. In recent years, however, this habit has evolved into a core productivity tool, a healthy routine, a wellness imperative, and even a cool, marketable, and consumable practice. In response to sleep becoming yet another product, this book defends the siesta as the art of interruption, one that is capable of slowing down and transforming the runaway rhythm of the present.
‘The Art of the Siesta reminded me of those great lateral, brief books that Italo Calvino proposed in Six Memos for the Next Millennium’ – Enrique Vila-Matas
Contact me to learn more
The Art of the Siesta by Miguel Ángel Hernández, published by Anagrama, 2020. 119 pp.
Chapter 4. The Sixth Hour
In ‘Tuesday Siesta’, the story that opens Gabriel García Márquez’s The Funerals of Mamá Grande, a woman and her daughter reach a village at midday after a journey by train in a third-class carriage. Dressed in ‘severe and poor mourning clothes’,[1] and with the sun at its zenith, mother and daughter traverse the sleeping village ‘without disturbing the siesta’. They knock at the priest’s door to ask for the keys to the cemetery. The thief shot dead the previous week during a robbery is the woman’s son. They’ve come to bring flowers to his tomb. He was a good man, they say. The sleepy priest, awoken from his siesta, insists that they wait until sundown. The village is sleeping, but the village is also watchful. Through the windows, through the slats in the lowered blinds.
A sense of lethargy and drowsiness emanates from the story. The village in the full glare of the sun, with no shadows to take refuge in. The sense of listlessness, of time being on pause, treacle-like. This is the siesta hour, when everything stops. This is midday, and everything has halted: ‘It was almost two. At that hour, weighted down by drowsiness, the town was taking a siesta’.
This sense of dilated, stretched-out time is also felt in The Afternoon of Mr. Andesmas, the novella by Marguerite Duras published in 1962, the same year as García Márquez’s story. The somnolence of the après-midi, the torpor of the moment in which memory returns. Everything takes place in the interval of the paused afternoon, between the several siestas of Mr. Andesmas. An ‘immobile time’, as Andrea Köhler wrote, which is also a time of waiting. Waiting as promise, the pleasant anticipation of this interval of time ending in sleep, or even the pleasure of the ‘vague sense of sinking, sleeping with our eyes open’.
It is the midday hour, when everything stops. The word ‘siesta’ comes, in fact, from the time of day in question: the sexta, one of the twelve hours into which the Romans divided the time between dawn and sunset. Depending on the seasonal variations of a system that depended on the length of the day, the sexta tended to fall around noon.
At this time, known as the meridies according to the division of the natural daylight hours, the Romans would interrupt their day for a meridiatio. A siesta. A custom practiced by the lazy and the hard-working alike. A widespread habit that Martial describes in his Epigrams: ‘until the fifth Rome employs herself in various occupations; the sixth brings rest to the fatigued; the seventh closes the day's labours.’
It is the time for repose and pleasant rest. A period that in the Christian world would become a time for solitary meditation and prayer.
The best-attested origin of the siesta – at least, the one mentioned most frequently – may be the special place it is assigned in one of the most widespread codes of behaviour during the European High Middle Ages: the famous Rule of Saint Benedict. In the conviction that ‘idleness is the enemy of the soul’, the Regula Sancti Benedicti compartmentalised the day of prayer and work – ora et labora – following the Roman hour scheme, with precise instructions on the tasks and prayers to be carried out by the monks. In chapter 48, ‘On the Daily Manual Labour’, Saint Benedict states that the monks may seek repose at the sixth hour, at least for the period between Easter and October: ‘After the sixth hour, having left the table, let them rest on their beds in perfect silence; or if anyone may perhaps want to read, let him read to himself in such a way as not to disturb anyone else.’
This document, written by Benito de Nursia in the first third of the 6th century, was gradually applied in all the monasteries of the order, and not only codified the lives of the monks, but had a decisive influence on the formation of the medieval world. As numerous studies have shown, monastic orders – particularly the Benedictine order – were the great codifiers and organisers of time in societies. In Judaism, and later in Islam, prayer occupied more loosely defined intervals of time: dawn, sunset. Greater precision was not necessary because prayer was a private affair. In the monasteries, however, the introduction of community prayer made necessary a more exact compartmentation of time, a kind of discipline that many see as a precedent for the division of time in the modern world. For example, in Technics and Civilization, Lewis Mumford affirms that ‘the Benedictines, the great working order, [are] perhaps the original founders of modern capitalism’. And he added that ‘the new mechanical conception of time arose in part out of the routine of the monastery.’
Although Mumford’s argument seems logical, it may be overstating the case. For one thing, it was centuries before the invention of the mechanical clock. For another, time in the monasteries continued to be ruled by the rhythms of natural time, compartmented but not yet mechanized. The time of the monasteries, although divided and segmented with alarm systems such as bell-ringing, which also marked time for civil society, continued to be the time of the body. Day and night. Work and rest. Not the time of the machines that culminated in the introduction of watches and chronometers into factories and workshop, as E.P Thompson’s classic study describes.
Neither the divine office – the liturgy of the hours – nor the periods of rest – such as the sixth hour – were imposed by an external and independent organization of time, but were in fact an adaptation of the natural rhythm of the body. It is this time of the body that disappears with the experience of capitalism. A residue that cannot be fully expunged and that always emerges as a kind of bug in the system, a clot that interrupts the perfect functioning of the machinery of production.
The real body is, in Georges Bataille’s words, the cursed share of modernity. This is brilliantly observed by David Le Breton: modernity both reveals and conceals the body. On the one hand, through science and reason, information on bodies is gathered and they are explored. And at the same time, they are annihilated and converted into a mere invisible tool, a burden to be got rid of.
In the digital world we move in today, this burden of the body is, if possible, even more evident. The utopia of the computerized world leads towards the conversion of our bodies into data, into pure, immaterial information, following the logic of Marx’s well-known line that ‘all that is solid melts into air’. But our bodies exist, and they have weight and volume. They need to feed, to digest, to rest. It is impossible for them to fully inhabit the virtual world. They are not the bodies in glory imagined by Saint Augustine in City of God, the bodies of the Resurrection, that have no weight, no smell, that do not decompose, that move from one place to another as if neither time nor space existed.
Our bodies are pure materiality. They inhabit time and space. The work of the Benedictines emphasized this very corporeal materiality. Hence the need for rest. The repose after the sixth hour. A respite for the body, but also a moment for privacy. Because at the sixth hour the monk returns to the darkness of his cell, to silence, to interiority, to the reading, meditation or rest of interiority. It is a time for privacy and intimacy. A time outside of the community. A time of shadows.
If we think about it, the elimination of purely private time is one of the characteristics of the world we live in. As I suggested in the chapter on the siesta in the age of capital, in this world that is connected 24/7 there is no way to mark a break with the outside. The moments and spaces of disconnection have vanished. Everything is light. There is no space for shadows. And without them, without shadows, we are disoriented. Perhaps that is why the siesta hour is the time when the sun is at its zenith and the shadows disappear. The time in which we must seek out shadow, to be alone with ourselves, to find ourselves.
Although it is not exactly about this, I think of the work of Hannah Arendt, to which I returned recently in order to write about the dimly-lit photographs of interiors by the Murcia-born artist, Rocío Kunst. In The Life of the Mind, Hannah Arendt observed the relationships between thought and shadow. While active life – work and action – takes place in the public sphere, the contemplative life, the activity of thinking, takes place in the private sphere, far from the light and constant noise. To think, says Arendt, it is necessary to withdraw from the world and venture into the shadows. To be alone together with oneself there. She described this existential state as solitude, in contrast to the loneliness of an isolated individual: ‘deserted not only by human company but also by the possible company of myself.’ In this silent and shadowy withdrawal, we take refuge and recollect, we develop our thoughts. Our thoughts on ourselves and on the world around us.
Today, almost fifty years after Arendt’s book, we can assert that solitude has practically disappeared. Transparency, light and the spectacle of the contemporary world creep into every corner of our private sphere, leaving barely a shred of shadow. We live in the glare of overexposure. And more than ever we need spaces of shade, where we can take refuge and cultivate this intimate encounter, allowing freedom of thought to emerge – which for Arendt was in fact the sole possibility of political action to change the world.
In a way, the withdrawal and repose of the sixth hour, the interruption of the siesta, the refuge in darkness, is a reconnection with the materiality of the body, and a taking control of interiority. To defend the siesta is to defend the body, the time of the body, and the time of shadows from the light, from the self-oriented individual, disconnected from the outside, withdrawn. More of a solitude than a loneliness. The time of keeping ourselves company.
[1] TN – quotes from the story are taken from the version by Gregory Rabassa and J.S. Bernstein.