Bedtime Stories for Grown-Ups

by Ben Holden

  These tales will prime you for those initial hypnagogic throes of sleep, which will be replicated to a degree by the subsequent section of pieces. There, after your brain fidgets its last throes, the body flips involuntarily into slumbers. This book will hold your hand as you paddle into the shallows of your consciousness.

  The next section of the book will be weighted to pull you down with the tides – hook, line and sinker – as your brainwaves deepen and you dive downward.

  Increasingly, the pieces then slipstream in rhythm with those more immersive stages of sleep, when mobility and muscle tone seeps away, just as body temperature drops. Such later selections at times run longer and may perhaps, occasionally, tip into surreality, just as your brain vividly dreams during this stratum of sleep. A sense of circularity within the pieces themselves will at times arise, almost as if they are sleepwalking in one another’s footsteps, or rather like those curious somnial echoes of daily life.

  Then the final pages should surge you up again. You will bob back to the surface. These last pieces might promise an awakening. It was all a dream, after all! You can close the book with a sense of renewal, as befits a new dawn.

  As you might have deduced, I have come to think of these stages of sleep, in many respects and like some other writers who have explored them in detail, as akin to the phases of a deep-sea dive. In turn, there is perhaps a fluidity or aqueous quality to some of the pieces and introductions. I have never scuba-dived, except in my dreams, yet I agree with Kafka that a good book should be an ‘axe to break the frozen sea inside us’.

  This one certainly intends to uncover a reflective, silvery surface for you. It might even at times – through the powerful pieces magpied here – provide a ripple-effect that reaches the outer edges of your mind, the furthest-flung frontiers of your ever-whirring brain.

  Such lofty aims aside, I hope primarily that this collection simply helps you get to sleep.

  My children laugh at its title. My daughter, when I first told her it, exclaimed, ‘But, Daddy, grown-ups don’t need bedtime stories!’ Oh, no, my angel? Perhaps one day, when you’re all grown-up and reading those same beloved tales to your own children, you might then enjoy curling up with the stories herein and change your mind. You can imagine me reading them to you. Or maybe, instead, read one aloud to your decrepit, fond old dad, while he toddles into second infancy.

  Similarly, reader, I hope that the pieces gathered here fire your imagination. I would like this book to ignite the trillion neurons and all their countless little dendrites, so that you can then dive down, deeper and deeper, over and over again.

  The firework display inside our brains, the light-fantastic that is aflame throughout sleep even while the body is glacial, is as wondrous and mysterious as the galaxy of stars that flares the night sky – or, more humbly, the glow-in-the-dark firmament sprayed above my sleeping children on their bedroom ceiling.

  Have a great night.

  Sleep well.

  ‘Evening’ softens and sings. It rolls, homeward, off the tongue – flattening out, from its yawning ‘ee’ – veering back upward – and into a round, definitive ‘ng’ finish. It heralds a levelling.

  In the words of Mick Jagger, ‘It is the evening of the day’.

  As the day dwindles, mellifluous milestones fleetingly pass us by: elusive magic hour or golden hour and the spellbinding witching hour; through to the downright beguiling gloaming (a Scandinavian word), twilight and, more bluntly, dusk. These are our cues, being diurnal creatures, to get in step with our circadian rhythms. Hesperus, the evening star, twinkles and heralds the transition to night and, soon enough, sleep. The day is done.

  In the early twentieth century, after the First World War, ‘Eventide Homes’ sprang up, retirement homes for the elderly that were maintained by the Salvation Army. These were final destinations for those who neared the end of their pilgrimage. ‘Eventide’ evoked a comforting vanishing-point and last resort. No wonder, as evening itself ushers daily returns from workaday cares: the revenant’s melancholic homecoming, the child holding her mother’s hand on the half-lit walk home from school, the lamps twinkling alight in windows, and sundown’s mauve blush.

  As the day is evened, and we return home, so journeys in time and space are embarked upon. Evening is the crepuscular creatures’ cue to come out and play: it’s vespertine time! These animals thrive on the transformative and furtive: the skunks prance; deer gambol; ocelots oscillate, their night vision sparking up; velveteen chinchillas leap out of their burrows; Strepsirrhini prod their wet noses into the air; while jaguars stalk onto the twilit turf, ready to hunt.

  Eventually even evening itself drifts off and flattens out.

  Night falls. As do we—

  Asleep.

  Time begins to pass at another, altogether different pace.

  Consider the poetry of twilight.

  One of contemporary poetry’s masters, Billy Collins, sets the scene (for this book, as a whole) – both in his poem I have chosen here, ‘In the Evening’, and with a selection of his own.

  Evening’s poetics (and, yes, all these poems are themselves bedtime stories) here themselves drift off, diffused by nightshade.

  Moonlit musings follow, in prose too, the shift reflecting that gradual but inexorable turn in time and space, onward into the darkness of night.

  In the Evening

  by Billy Collins

  The heads of roses begin to droop.

  The bee who has been hauling her gold

  all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

  In the sky, traces of clouds,

  the last few darting birds,

  watercolors on the horizon.

  The white cat sits facing a wall.

  The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

  I light a candle on the wood table.

  I take another sip of wine.

  I pick up an onion and a knife.

  And the past and the future?

  Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

  (2005)

  ★

  BILLY COLLINS

  A strong poem should awaken its readers by dramatizing in vivid language some crucial truth about being alive. Jane Kenyon’s poem ‘Let Evening Come’ does that. But its calm tone of resignation to the daily passing of time, which will inevitably end in the ‘evening’ of death, also relaxes us with its gently repeated advice (‘Let . . .’) and leads us finally to an affirmation of a caring God. Notice how the poem guides our attention from one delicately chosen image to the next (sunlight, barn, cricket, hoe, stars, moon, fox, bottle, scoop), each locked in its own rural, unpeopled scene, until in the last stanza, the poem dissolves into prayer. For all its wise maturity, the poem delivers a reassurance similar to that of the bedtime classic ‘Now I lay me down to sleep . . .’ Yes, go gentle into that good night, is Kenyon’s quieting advice as well as the poem’s blessing.

  Let Evening Come

  by Jane Kenyon

  Let the light of late afternoon

  shine through chinks in the barn, moving

  up the bales as the sun moves down.

  Let the cricket take up chafing

  as a woman takes up her needles

  and her yarn. Let evening come.

  Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

  in long grass. Let the stars appear

  and the moon disclose her silver horn.

  Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

  Let the wind die down. Let the shed

  go black inside. Let evening come.

  To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

  in the oats, to air in the lung

  let evening come.

  Let it come, as it will, and don’t

  be afraid. God does not leave us

  comfortless, so let evening come.

  (1990)

  Billy Collins has served two terms as US Poet Laureate and also was selected as the New York State Poet 2004–2006. He has publishe
d fourteen collections of poetry, including Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003–13. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

  ★

  Evening Walk

  by Charles Simic

  You give the appearance of listening

  To my thoughts, O trees,

  Bent over the road I am walking

  On a late summer evening

  When every one of you is a steep staircase

  The night is slowly descending.

  The high leaves like my mother’s lips

  Forever trembling, unable to decide,

  For there’s a bit of wind,

  And it’s like hearing voices,

  Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,

  A huge dark mouth we can all fit in

  Suddenly covered by a hand.

  Everything quiet. Light

  Of some other evening strolling ahead,

  Long-ago evening of silk dresses,

  Bare feet, hair unpinned and falling.

  Happy heart, what heavy steps you take

  As you follow after them in the shadows.

  The sky at the road’s end cloudless and blue.

  The night birds like children

  Who won’t come to dinner.

  Lost children in the darkening woods.

  (1990)

  ★

  Born in Calcutta in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore led an extraordinary life. A painter as well as a writer of plays, novels, short stories and songs, Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. A political progressive, he was also a close friend but critic of Gandhi, and played a key role in India’s independence. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are Tagore compositions and his poetry also directly inspired that of Sri Lanka.

  Tagore’s grander designs of social morality and nationhood permeate ‘A Single Night’. Much of the story is taken up by a man’s matter-of-fact, great expectations of his future. Yet for all his big schemes, in this old-fashioned patriarchy, pride seems bound to come before a fall. Life is happening to other people while he makes plans. By the time our protagonist notices this, a more poignant cautionary tale has emerged, complete with careful-what-you-wish-for wistfulness. Before he or we realize, life has crested onto its downward slope, and the story slides into retrospection.

  ’Twas ever thus! Priorities and perspectives change over time, as our emotional axes shift. It seems ironic that we humans sleep and dream less as we age, just as we have so many more experiences and regrets to dream on, and time to rest. Nevertheless, we all still find space, between the now and then, to realize in dreams, tantalizingly, our what-might-have-beens.

  Sure enough, this narrator’s pining and solitude, amid the fragrant moonlight – the dreamer’s anguish – is eventually washed away by a cosmic deluge . . . during one single, extraordinary night.

  A Single Night

  by Rabindranath Tagore

  I went to school with Surabala, and we played ‘getting married’ games together. Surabala’s mother was very affectionate towards me whenever I went to their house. Seeing us as a pair, she would murmur to herself, ‘They’re meant for each other!’ I was young, but I understood her drift fairly well. The feeling that I had a greater than normal claim to Surabala fixed itself in my mind. I became so puffed up with this feeling that I tended to boss her about. She meekly obeyed all my orders and endured my punishments. She was praised in the neighbourhood for her beauty, but beauty meant nothing to my barbarous young eyes: I merely knew that Surabala had been born to acknowledge my lordship over her – hence my inconsiderate behaviour.

  My father was the chief rent-collector on the Chaudhuris’ estate. His hope was that he would train me in estate-management when I was grown up, and find me a job as a land-agent somewhere. But I didn’t like that idea at all. My ambitions were as high as our neighbour’s son Nilratan’s, who ran away to Calcutta to study and had become chief clerk to a Collector. Even if I didn’t become that, I was determined to be at least Head Clerk in a magistrate’s court. I had always noticed how respectful my father was towards legal officers of that kind. I had known since childhood that it was necessary, on various occasions, to make offerings to them of fish, vegetables and money; so I gave a specially privileged position in my heart to court employees, even to the peons. They were the most venerated of Bengal’s deities, new miniature editions of her millions of gods. In pursuing prosperity, people placed greater trust in them than in bountiful Ganesh himself – so all the tribute that Ganesh formerly received now went to them.

  Inspired by Nilratan’s example, I also took my chance to run away to Calcutta. First I stayed with an acquaintance from my home village; later my father began to give me some help towards my education. My studies proceeded along conventional lines.

  In addition, I attended meetings and assemblies. I had no doubt that it would soon become necessary for me to lay down my life for my country. But I had no idea how to accomplish so momentous an act, and no one to look to for an example. I was not, however, short of enthusiasm. We were village-boys, and had not learnt to ridicule everything like the smart boys of Calcutta; so our zeal was unshakeable. The leaders at our meetings gave speeches, but we used to wander about from house to house in the heat of the day, without lunch, begging for subscriptions; or we stood by the roadside giving out handbills; or we arranged benches and chairs before meetings. We were ready to roll up our sleeves and fight at the slightest word against our leaders. But to the smart boys of Calcutta, all this merely demonstrated our rural naïvety.

  I had come to qualify myself to be a Head Clerk or Superintendent; but I was actually preparing to become Mazzini or Garibaldi. Meanwhile my father and Surabala’s father agreed that I should be married to her. I had run away to Calcutta at the age of fifteen, when Surabala was eight; now I was eighteen. In my father’s opinion my marriageable age was elapsing. But I vowed I would never marry: I would die for my country instead. I told my father I would not marry until my studies were completely finished.

  Two or three months later I heard that Surabala had been married to the lawyer Ramlochan Babu. I was busy collecting subscriptions for down-trodden India, so I attached no importance to the news.

  I passed into college, and was about to take my second-year exams when news came of my father’s death. I was not the only one in the family – I had my mother and two sisters. So I had to leave college and search for work. With great difficulty I managed to get a post as assistant master in a secondary school in a small town in Naukhali District. I told myself I had found the right sort of work. My guidance and encouragement would raise each pupil to be a leader of the new India.

  I started work. I found that the coming exam was much more demanding than the new India. The headmaster objected if I breathed a single word to the pupils outside Grammar and Algebra. In a couple of months my enthusiasm had faded away. I became one of those dull individuals who sits and broods when he is at home; who, when working, shoulders his plough with his head bowed, whipped from behind, meekly breaking up earth; content at night to stuff his belly with cattle-fodder; no energy or enterprise in him at all.

  For fear of fire, one of the teachers had to live on the school premises. I was unmarried, so this duty fell upon me. I lived in a hut adjoining the large, thatched school-building. The school was rather isolated; it stood next to a big pond. There were betel nut, coconut and coral trees all around; a pair of huge old nim trees – adjacent to each other and to the schoolhouse itself – gave shade.

  There is something which I haven’t mentioned so far and which for a long time I didn’t think worthy of mention. The government lawyer here, Ramlochan Ray, lived quite near our schoolhouse. And I knew that his wife – my childhood companion Surabala – was there with him.

  I became acquainted with Ramlochan Babu. I’m not sure if he was aware that as a child I had known Surabala, and when we met I did not think it appropriate to
mention this. I did not particularly think about the fact that Surabala had at one time been involved with my life.

  One day, during a school holiday, I went along to Ramlochan’s house for a chat. I can’t remember what we talked about – probably India’s present plight. Not that he was very well-informed or concerned about the subject, but it was a way of passing an hour-and-a-half or so, smoking, and indulging in pleasurable gloom. As we talked I heard in the next room the soft tinkling of bangles, the rustle of garments, the sound of footsteps; it wasn’t hard to deduce that inquisitive eyes were observing me through the half-open window. Suddenly I remembered those eyes – large eyes full of trust, simplicity and childish devotion: black pupils, dark eyelashes, an ever-calm gaze. Something seemed to clench my heart, and an anguish throbbed within me.

  I returned to my hut, but the pain remained. Writing and reading were no distraction from it; it oppressed me like a huge weight in my chest, thudding in my veins. In the evening I calmed down a little and asked myself why I should be in such a state. The inner answer came, ‘You are wondering why you lost your Surabala.’

  I replied, ‘But I gave her up willingly. I couldn’t let her wait for me for ever.’

  Someone within me said, ‘You could have got her if you had wanted then, but now nothing whatsoever you can do will give you the right even to see her. However close the Surabala of your childhood lives to you now, however often you hear the tinkle of her bangles or feel the scent of her hair brushing past you, there will always be a wall keeping you apart.’

  ‘No matter,’ I said, ‘who is Surabala to me?’

  The reply came: ‘Surabala is not yours today, but think what she could have been to you!’

  That was true. Surabala could have been mine. She could have been my closest, most intimate companion; she could have shared all my sorrows and joys; but now she was so far away, so much someone else’s, seeing her now was forbidden, it was a fault to speak to her, a sin to think about her. And a certain Ramlochan Babu, who was nobody before, was suddenly in the way. By mouthing a few mantras, he had whisked Surabala away from everyone else in the world.