January 18, 2023, 11:05 am
Peter Handke has been living in the small town of Chaville, south-west of Paris, for more than 30 years. The first text that was written here in 1990 was Handke’s “An attempt on a successful day”. Impressed by William Hogarth’s “Line of Beauty and Grace” in a self-portrait of the painter, inspired by a “lime-white vein” in a granite stone from Lake Constance on his desk and marveling at the sinuous course of the suburban line between the Seine hills, Handke “begins the almost dismissed idea of the “successful day”” and “attempting to describe, or list, or narrate the elements and problems of such a day”. Handke wrote this essay when he was in his late 40s. His “Attempt about a successful day” is a form of self-questioning and reflection on one’s own life practice. We also find here what he won the Nobel Prize for decades later – the exploration of the periphery and the specificity of human experience through poetic means. Significantly, Handke’s essay also has the subtitle: “A Winter’s Daydream”.
Presentation: Kurt Reissnegger