Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
“There is nothing
like desire for preventing the thing one says from bearing any
resemblance to what one has in one’s mind. Time presses, and yet it
seems as though we were seeking to gain time by speaking of subjects
absolutely alien to that by which we are obsessed.”
Marcel Proust, Le C
Here’s my main trouble in life: I’m a morning person and a night owl. I think I never really got over the sense of injustice and deprivation all children harbor about having to go to bed–the certainty that they’ll miss out on something, the slight skepticism that another day will really dawn and the whole cycle will start over again, and the instinctive resistance to endings of any kind. When you’re eight, bedtime feels like a life sentence.
In my ostensible adulthood, I still have a romantic attachment to the small hours of the night; they feel like the temporal equivalent of mad money, to be used however one pleases–not to put too fine a point on it, to be pleasantly wasted. As an adult, I know morning will come, and with it a renewed sense of possibility, not to mention the day’s best light. So I’m jealous of that time as well, and if I sleep past eight or nine–which I usually do when I don’t have to be anywhere–I feel profoundly cheated. Trouble is, if I indulge on both ends, I’m left with about four hours of sleep per night, not a quantity on which I function well. I know, I know–you say nap. Alas, I’m the world’s worst napper (it leaves me groggy for the rest of the day), and I hate to miss all of the other times of day, too.
So it’s going on 2:00 now, my alarm will ring in less than five hours, my eyelids are fighting to hold at half-mast, and yet here I sit. Tonight is not the ideal example, since I’m blogging the time away rather than merrily frittering it. But it’s close enough.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m a big fan of sleep. It’s my favorite remedy for any ailment and a particular temptation since I bought my first new mattress set a couple of years ago after a decade of sleeping on futons and castoffs. I didn’t really know what I was doing when I shopped for the mattress, but I did something right–it’s heavenly. So nope, I don’t want to give up any sleep at all; I want the sleep, the late nights, and the bright mornings–24-hour days plus 8-hour nights. But the one thing that would seriously throw a wrench into my contentedness is insomnia.
Which is all a circuitous way of recommending a book to you. A little while back, a reader wrote asking me for summer reading suggestions. I have a few in mind, and the first is Robert Cohen’s smart novel about insomnia, Inspired Sleep. The book’s protagonist, Bonnie Saks, is a single working mom and longtime ABD student in search of slumber. In desperation, she submits herself to a sleep study. In this passage, set in a lab, the experimental treatment she undergoes seems to work:
She closed her eyes. She could feel her tension rising up, as it did every night, to do battle with her exhaustion. Vague sounds of traffic swished by in the distance. Night people, headed home. She thought of the young man next door, somber and alert, bathed in light, monitoring every flicker of response on the scrolling screen. Up and down: it seemed all her nocturnal complexities could be reduced to that. Patiently he had explained the many exquisite functions of the recording equipment–how they tracked the alpha and delta waves, the eye movements, the muscle convulsions, K-complexes, oxygen saturation, and sleep spindles. What had he called them? The deepest mechanisms of the self. It was a comfort to know they were at work, minding the store in her absence.It gave her a pleasant feeling of security. She began to feel very far from things, and at the same time oddly imminent, on the verge of a salient truth.
She’d been wrong–it was not sleep but the waking life that was the interlude between the acts, the bright but meandering intermission. Because now, with the lights off, that whole state of being simply collapsed, as crumpled and disposable as a coffee cup. She had been lingering out in the lobby much too long. Now the intermission was over. Now she was back, facing the stage where all her heart’s noisy operettas were playing and playing, forever trying to complete themselves. And now the house lights were going down, and the curtains drawing open, and she was being ushered in, and all the separate players in night’s continuous orchestra were rising up in concert with their finely tuned instruments, getting ready to welcome her, the errant maestro, back to the podium at last.
Inspired Sleep is available in a trade paperback edition. More recommendations down the road. For now, sweet dreams.
“Work at first rescues us, then ravages us.”
Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms
It lives. I haven’t been much in evidence around here lately, I know. There was an impromptu visit home for the long weekend, which came as a surprise to some–my mother nearly fainted dead away–a writing deadline, and very, very little sleep since I left Detroit a day and a half ago. Going to bed right this minute is the only sane thing to do, but I hope to post a couple of things Wednesday night and then resume my scheduled weekend bloggifying.