40 Winks

FOR THE RECORD “The Only Wilderness We Have Left”

Sleep Through the Ages (PT. 1)

Come Sleep! O Sleep, the certain knot of peace, The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe, The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release, Th’ indifferent judge between the high and low. – Sir Philip Sidney, “Astrophil and Stella 39: Come Sleep! O Sleep” (1582)

Methought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep”—the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast. – William Shakespeare, Macbeth (1623)

An ancient poem goes, “After a long, sound sleep in bamboo-shaded quiet, I feel so far removed from the day’s turmoil. If the hermit of Huashan comes to visit me, I shall not ask for the secret of becoming an immortal, but of sleeping well.” – Li Yu, Casual Notes in a Leisurely Mood (1671)

We know that God is everywhere; but certainly we feel his presence most when his works are on the grandest scale spread before us; and it is in the unclouded night sky, where his worlds wheel their silent course, that we read clearest his infinitude, his omnipotence, his omnipresence. I had risen to my knees to pray for Mr. Rochester. Looking up, I, with tear-dimmed eyes, saw the mighty Milky Way. Remembering what it was—what countless systems there swept space like a soft trace of light—I felt the might and strength of God. Sure was I of his efficiency to save what he had made: convinced I grew that neither earth should perish, nor one of the souls it treasured. I turned my prayer to thanksgiving: the Source of Life was also the Savior of spirits. Mr. Rochester was safe; he was God’s, and by God would he be guarded. I again nestled to the breast of the hill, and ere long in sleep forgot sorrow. – Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Better sleep with a sober cannibal than a drunken Christian. – Herman Melville, Moby Dick (1851)

The laugher and weeper, the dancer, the midnight widow [...] The consumptive, the erysipalite, the idiot, he that is wrong’d, The antipodes, and every one between this and them in the dark, I swear they are averaged now—one is no better than the other, The night and sleep have liken’d them and restored them.

I swear they are all beautiful, Every one that sleeps is beautiful, every thing in the dim light is beautiful, The wildest and bloodiest is over, and all is peace. – Walt Whitman, “The Sleepers” (1856)

Oh! long, long nights, crowded with the fearful acceleration of trivial thoughts crushed one upon another, crowding so fast. ‘My God,’ I pray, ‘Let me sleep, only sleep,’ and conquered by this abject need, this weariness unutterable, I am fain to believe that this gift, common to the brute and slave, is better than anything my mind can gain for me. – Anne Reeve Aldrich, A Village Ophelia and Other Stories (1899)

The nighttime of the body is the daytime of the soul. – Amelia E. Barr, The Maid of Maiden Lane (1900)

Blessed sleep, kindest minister to man, Sure and silent distiller of the balm of rest, Having alone the power, when naught else can, To soothe the torn and sorrow-ridden breast. – James Weldon Johnson, “Blessed Sleep” (1917)

In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words being said at the same time down in the deep, hidden places. There is a deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions. How many things are hidden away in the deep well! There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about saying words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accumulating money, wearing clothes, one lives an ordinary life.

Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles… – Sherwood Anderson, Many Marriages (1923)

FOR THE RECORD

FOR THE RECORD Come, mild and magnificent Sleep, and let your tides flow through the nation… come to us through the fields of night, over the plains and rivers of the everlasting earth, bringing to the huge vexed substance of this world and to all the fury, pain, and madness of our lives the merciful anodyne of your redemption. Seal up the porches of our memory, tenderly, gently, steal our lives away from us, blot out the vision of lost love, lost days, and all our ancient hungers, great Transformer, heal us! – Thomas Wolfe, “Death the Proud Brother” (1933)

It appears that every man’s insomnia is as different from his neighbor’s as are their daytime hopes and aspirations. […] If insomnia is going to be one of your naturals, it begins to appear in the late thirties. Those seven precious hours of sleep suddenly break in two. There is, if one is lucky, the “first sweet sleep of night” and the last deep sleep of morning, but between the two appears a sinister, ever widening interval. This is the time of which it is written in the Psalms: Scuto circumdabit te veritas eius: non timebis a timore nocturno, a sagitta volante in die, a negotio perambulante in tenebris. [His truth shall compass thee with a shield: thou shalt not be afraid of the terror of the night. Of the arrow that flieth in the day, of the business that walketh about in the dark…] – F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Sleeping and Waking,” 1934

People who dream when they sleep at night know of a special kind of happiness which the world of the day holds not, a placid ecstasy, and ease of heart, that are like honey on the tongue. … The pleasure of the true dreamer does not lie in the substance of the dream, but in this: that there things happen without any interference from his side, and altogether outside his control. Great landscapes create themselves, long splendid views, rich and delicate colors, roads, houses, which he has never seen or heard of. – Karen Blixen (Isak Dinesen), Out of Africa (1937)

[T]ruth, like love and sleep, resents Approaches that are too intense. – W. H. Auden, “New Year Letter” (1940)

Did you ever notice how people hate to go to bed? They’ll hang around and hang around, drink coffee and smoke cigarettes and talk, hating to go home and go to sleep. … It’s kind of like dying, I guess, sleeping is. They just naturally hold back from it. They hang around the street or a place like this, doing nothing, just hanging around talking. – Roaldus Richmond, from the Federal Writers’ Project’s Folklore Project (1940)