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.

Mason Cooley, City Aphorisms

Fortunately, you don’t have to know anything about the convoluted history of the Barnes to be fascinated by the place itself. Dr. Albert Barnes, a man far too peculiar to be sufficiently described by the word “eccentric,” spent the better part of a half-century buying paintings and devising the unusual ways in which they are now displayed in the gallery he built in 1925 to house them. I don’t know any other museum quite like the Barnes, whose walls are tightly packed with hundreds and hundreds of works by the likes of Cézanne, Daumier, El Greco, Klee, Matisse, Picasso, Renoir, and such early American modernists as Maurice Prendergast, Charles Demuth, and Alfred Maurer, all of them hung without identification save for a tiny tag bearing the artist’s last name.

Like everyone seeing the Barnes for the first time, I was flabbergasted, not merely by the number of masterpieces it contains but also by the sheer acreage of canvas on display, and it took me the better part of an afternoon to sort out my complicated responses. Here are a few verbal snapshots from my visit, scribbled into my notebook on the spot and amplified at leisure:

• I found the excessiveness of the Barnes Foundation to be central to its total effect. Seeing a dozen paintings at a single glance may not be the best way to appreciate any of them individually, but it’s certainly exciting, even overwhelming, and there’s nothing wrong (to put it mildly!) with being overwhelmed by art.

In addition, I was delighted by the absence of wall labels. As I wrote in this space a couple of years ago, apropos of a visit to “Gyroscope,” an exhibition at Washington’s Hirshhorn Museum:

As those of you who know me personally are all too aware, I have reached that unhappy age when I am sorely in need of bifocals. Alas, I’m too stubborn/vain/lazy to go to the trouble of getting a pair, so I continue to do without. I noticed for the first time at the Hirshhorn on Friday that I can no longer read the wall labels at museums without taking off my glasses. At first I found this to be irritating, but before long I realized that it was liberating.

Confession time: I have another little problem, which is that my eyes reflexively go to the labels in a group show, very often before I’ve taken in the works of art they identify. I can’t help myself—I’m a slave to the printed word. Only I can’t do it anymore. To read the labels, I now have to pull off my glasses and move in close, which takes away all the fun. As a result, I looked at “Gyroscope” the right way, meaning what first and who second, and not infrequently, I didn’t even bother to find out who. (In addition to a reasonably generous helping of good stuff, “Gyroscope” contains more than its fair share of crappy art.) Dr. Albert Barnes, who deliberately hung the paintings in the Barnes Collection without labels in order to force visitors to think harder about the art they were there to see, would have been proud of me….

I’ve just admitted to a naïve-sounding disability which I’m sure will make some of you smile. I came late to the visual arts, and I still fall on my face with humbling regularity. I’m no connoisseur, just a guy who likes to look at paintings, though I trust my eye and my taste. On the other hand, I don’t trust them far enough to be absolutely sure I’m always seeing paintings, not reputations, which is one of the minor reasons why I think I’ll put off getting that first pair of bifocals for a little while longer.

Now that I’ve finally broken down and started wearing bifocals, I find myself tempted once again to read before looking. You can’t do that at the Barnes. So much the better. It keeps you honest.

• Barnes hung his paintings in non-chronological groupings intended to help the novice viewer see the similarities between the compositional devices employed by different artists from different periods. Alas, most of his painstaking arrangements struck me as naïve: I quickly tired of their rigid pyramidal symmetry, and the picture-to-picture “rhyming” rarely seemed other than obvious (though I’m sure students find it instructive, which of course is what Barnes had in mind).

The only juxtaposition that I found eye-opening was the wall on which watercolors by Cézanne and Charles Demuth are hung side by side—along with two Japanese fans. That taught me something. (I hadn’t realized, by the way, that Barnes collected Demuth in such depth. Never before had I seen so many of his marvelous watercolors in one place.)

• I was surprised by how many paintings I saw on my second pass through the galleries that I’d failed to notice the first time through—including more than a few of the ones I ended up liking best. (I actually mistook one postcard-sized Daumier for a switchplate.) The problem, I think, is that Albert Barnes’ taste for high-key color was so pronounced, even exaggerated, that the collection as a whole, with its relentless emphasis on the intense reds and oranges of his beloved Renoirs, has the unintended effect of swallowing up smaller and/or less brightly colored paintings of great excellence.

• The Barnes contains 181 Renoirs, most of them late and most of them awful. Indeed, a day at the Barnes Foundation is almost enough to persuade you that Renoir was a minor painter. You have to flee its stifling atmosphere and remind yourself anew of what a really good Renoir looks like in order to recapture your perspective.

• Barnes was as smart about Cézanne and Matisse as he was silly about Renoir. Granted, you can “know” Cézanne without having gone to the Barnes Foundation: it’s a great, great collection, but it doesn’t tell you anything about him that you can’t find out elsewhere. Not so Matisse. Even after a decade of serious and sustained exposure to his work, a single visit to the Barnes significantly heightened my understanding of Matisse’s language and my appreciation of his achievement.

• My favorite individual room in the Barnes was Gallery 10, devoted almost entirely to small paintings. Dominated by Matisse, it’s one of the few galleries that contains nothing by Cézanne. I could live in that room.

• It goes almost without saying that the single greatest painting in the Barnes is “The Large Bathers.” (I almost hate to admit it, but I don’t really care for “The Joy of Life”!) But my personal favorite—the one I’d most like to hang in the Teachout Museum—is a late Cézanne, undated and very likely unfinished, called “Two Pitchers and Fruit.” It reminded me strongly of the Phillips Collection’s “Garden at Les Lauves” and is of exactly comparable quality.

Not coincidentally, seeing the Barnes for the first time redoubled my appreciation of the Phillips. While Albert Barnes and Duncan Phillips were both great art collectors whose underlying sensibilities were very similar, Barnes was both obsessive and provincial in a way that Phillips was not. Phillips spent a lifetime cultivating his eye and mind by engaging with the ideas of others; Barnes seems to have listened only to himself, eventually going so far as to create a closed system of aesthetics whose sole purpose was to justify his own prejudices, unleavened by the kind of broadening experience that ultimately led Phillips in such surprising directions. For all his self-evident passion and seriousness, Barnes was incapable of the kind of interior growth that made it possible for Phillips to embrace Mark Rothko and Richard Diebenkorn in his old age.

• I’m glad I waited so long to go to the Barnes for the first time. It’s not a place for the casual museumgoer. That’s why it will be a crime to move it elsewhere. I’m not talking about the complex legal and fiscal issues at stake in the planned move—I’m not competent to assess those. I’m talking about purely aesthetic matters. The Barnes isn’t perfect, not by a long shot, but it’s unique, and that’s the point of it. Putting aside the distracting effects of the thousands of visitors who will start flocking to the new Barnes the day it opens its doors, the sense of pilgrimage is an essential part of the experience of visiting the Barnes Foundation. You can’t just drop by on the spur of the moment—you have to make a reservation in advance and go well out of your way to get there. That contributes enormously to its special quality. Once the Barnes pulls up stakes and moves downtown, this quality will be lost forever, even if the existing galleries are reproduced exactly in its new quarters (which I’ll believe when I see it).

Go now. I’m glad I did.