The Second Figure

Haňťa

The wastepaper compactor of Prague — the second figure of the Idle Pantheon.

Revealed · No. II of XII

II. of XII

Haňťa, the second figure of the Idle Pantheon

His standing in the five measures

Idleness 8

The mark is the point: he slowed the work to the speed of reading and moved in. The job is a hermitage with a salary. Minus two because he does, in the end, make the bales, and makes them beautifully.

Wisdom 9

Docked a single point for the reason he would insist on himself: he can no longer tell which thoughts are his own and which came down through the hole with the paper.

Wanderlust 2

The lowest mark yet awarded. A staircase, a cellar, a tavern; his travels are conducted through the rescued pages, the only tourism he has ever trusted.

Defiance 9

Quiet, total, and never once announced. His lateness is his politics; his cellar is a resistance cell with a staff of one. Missing a point because his refusal never learns to say no aloud.

Sociability 4

Low, and tender in its lowness: authors he argues with, mice who share his sandwiches. Not a hermit by grievance but by acoustics.

Haňťa is a compactor of wastepaper in a cellar beneath Prague, thirty-five years at the same hydraulic press, and the slowest destroyer of the written word his city has ever employed. His job is execution; his method is rescue: he reads what he is sent to kill, and the condemned books go home with him, two tons of them roofing his bed on planks, so that he sleeps each night beneath everything he refused to destroy.

He is educated against his will, a complete civilization built in his head without a single intention, Kant and Lao Tzu shelved between the mice and the beer, and the beer is not a vice but an instrument: done sober, the work would only be work. To every bale he gives a burial, an open classic laid at its heart, so that even the garbage of Prague leaves the world dressed for somewhere better. He is the second figure of the Idle Pantheon because he answers the first: where Lichter made unproductivity a prayer, Haňťa made slowness a rescue, and he proves that idleness can hold a job for thirty-five years without once working for it.

Download Haňťa

The engraving and his full standing, zipped, free, yours to keep.

← Back to the Pantheon