4 minute read
Sleep Through the Ages, Pt. 2
It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it. – John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (1954)
“If we don’t ever sleep again, so much the better,” José Arcadio Buendía said in good humor. “That way we can get more out of life.” But the Indian woman explained that the most fearsome part of the sickness of insomnia was not the impossibility of sleeping, for the body did not feel any fatigue at all, but its inexorable evolution toward a more critical manifestation: a loss of memory. She meant that when the sick person became used to his state of vigil, the recollection of his childhood began to be erased from his memory, then the name and notion of things, and finally the identity of people and even the awareness of his own being, until he sank into a kind of idiocy that had no past. – Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
To know the abyss of the darkness and not to fear it, to entrust oneself to it and whatever may arise from it—what greater gift? – Ursula K. Le Guin, The New Atlantis and Other Novellas of Science Fiction (1975)
[Sleep is] a surrender, a laying down of arms. Whatever plans you’re making, whatever work you’re up to your ears in, whatever pleasures you’re enjoying, whatever sorrows or anxieties or problems you’re in the midst of, you set them aside, find a place to stretch out somewhere, close your eyes, and wait for sleep.
All the things that make you the particular person you are stop working—your thoughts and feelings, the changing expressions of your face, the constant moving around, the yammering will, the relentless or not so relentless purpose. But
FOR THE RECORD
FOR THE RECORD all the other things keep on working with a will and purpose of their own. You go on breathing in and out. Your heart goes on beating. If some faint thought stirs somewhere in the depths of you, it’s converted into a dream so you can go on sleeping and not have to wake up to think it through before it’s time.
Whether you’re just or unjust, you have the innocence of a cat dozing under the stove. Whether you’re old or young, homely or fair, you take on the serenity of marble. You have given up being in charge of your life. You have put yourself into the hands of the night.
It is a rehearsal for the final laying down of arms, of course, when you trust yourself to the same unseen benevolence to see you through the dark and to wake you when the time comes— with new hope, new strength—into the return again of light. – Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark (1988)
Sleep is the best meditation. – Dalai Lama (1989)
But we never arrive at a condition where we are beyond sleep, self-sufficient in twenty-four hour control. Daily we give up consciousness, submitting ourselves to that which is deeper than consciousness in order to grow and be healed, be created and saved. Going to sleep is a biological necessity; it can also be an act of faith. People who live by faith have always welcomed the evening hour for prayer, disengaging themselves from the discordant, arhythmic confusion of tongues, and sinking into the quiet rhythms of God’s creating and covenanting words. Even though it is decreed in our bodies that we return to this sleep, it is not easy. We want to stay in control. We want to oversee the operation. Evening prayer is a deliberate act of spirit that cultivates willingly what our bodies force on us finally. — Eugene Peterson, Answering God (1989)
Sleep is the prayer the body prays, Breathing in unthought faith the Breath That through our worry-wearied days Preserves our rest, and is our truth. – Wendell Berry, “V.” (1990)
FOR THE RECORD
When every inch of the world is known, sleep may be the only wilderness that we have left. – Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance (1995)
There is nothing to be done at three a.m. except hold on. – Sukhdev Sandhu, Night Haunts (2006)
It should be no surprise that there is an erosion of sleep now everywhere, given the immensity of what is at stake economically. Over the course of the twentieth century, there were steady inroads made against the time of sleep— the average North American adult now sleeps approximately six and a half hours a night, an erosion from eight hours a generation ago, and (hard as it is to believe) down from ten hours in the early twentieth century. … The scandal of sleep is the embeddedness in our lives of the rhythmic oscillations of solar light and darkness, activity and rest, of work and recuperation, that have been eradicated or neutralized elsewhere… [W]ithin the globalist neoliberal paradigm, sleeping is for losers. – Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (2013)
In 1989 the Guinness Book of World Records deemed sleep deprivation too dangerous and deleted the category. – Alice Robb, Why We Dream (2018)
