The film we saw that night was about the writer J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up.
At one point in the film, the actor playing Barrie says, “It’s a terrible thing to put a boy to bed, because when he wakes up, he will be one day older.”
Jenny and I both started sobbing.
When we got home, we found Benny still awake, but grandma sound asleep in front of the TV. She had had five children of her own. She knew what to do.
We nursed Benedict for a while, and we talked about the kind of world our three children would grow up in. We wondered what the future would hold for our little ones, both Benedict and the two on their way. We knew they would need us to hold them. But they also needed to be cradled within a culture, a civilization, a pillow of language and ideas on which they could lay their heads, a blanket of beliefs that would shelter them from the cold.
Thinking of where we might shelter our forthcoming twins, we looked at all kinds of houses in all kinds of places within a radius of sixty miles and eventually found one around the corner from where we had been. And so, in the heat of summer, with an army of helpers and a small fleet of dusty vehicles, we managed to move the whole contents of our lives from one house to the next in a single long day.
That night, at 11:00 PM, I was exhausted but restless, so I took a stroll out to our backyard. We’d already planted two olive trees near the fence; their leaves were scratching wakefully in the hot breeze. Since Homer’s time, olive trees have been seen an image of stability. Planting them is a bit like making your bed. It’s something to do as soon as you arrive because olives take their time. You’d like to think otherwise, but you know you’ll be dead long before they’ve really woken up.
Beyond the olives was the silhouette of a sleeping horse.
A sleeping horse is a calming sight. There are plenty of humans who move more when they are asleep than awake; they wake tired because they have done more exercise tossing and turning in the night than they do in their sedentary occupations. But horses are not like that. In order to rest, a horse stands to attention. It is more poised and graceful than in full stride. A horse at sleep is a statue of itself.
Sleeping animals shed a lot of light on human sleep. Dolphins are able to sleep one side of their brain at a time, suggestive of a superior cognitive development to our own, at least in that regard. Giraffes, on the other hand, usually only sleep for a few minutes each day and seldom more than an hour or two. They sleep with their eyes open, walking about. In fact, it’s hard to tell if a giraffe is sleeping, partly because it’s not easy to catch them in the act. The only rule of thumb for the uninitiated is that if a giraffe looks like it is asleep, then it almost certainly isn’t.
Giraffes behave like this for good reason. They are creatures with few enemies, mainly because no one else wants to get their food from the top shelf. So giraffes have been able to develop a cooperative relationship with other species. They are the watchtowers of the open plains, able to spy trouble and warn others at any hour of the day or night. Other creatures can sleep because giraffes don’t.
Horses are similar to the extent that they are also at home in the open; they sleep like recoiled springs, ready to move on short notice. Humans, on the other hand, learned to sleep in caves, which is why they are happiest if nothing disturbs them before daylight.
Horses don’t sleep long hours either, maybe two or three hours a day. But they have developed a method of locking their knees into place so that they can sleep on their feet without losing balance or waking themselves by falling over. This “stay apparatus,” a canny arrangement of tendons and ligaments, turns itself on automatically in the horse’s front legs when the horse starts to relax. To activate the lock in its rear legs, the horse has to wiggle its hips until certain bones hook together. Occasionally, it is unable to get itself unhooked and the horse can’t move. Once asleep, a horse may then lie down and, when lying, will enter a different level of sleep not unlike the human REM sleep, about which we will be hearing more in the small hours. But in general terms, the horse has such a fine system of resting on its feet that horses have been known to remain standing for years on end without growing weary. When asleep, they are beautifully still.
The sight of a sleeping horse is a tonic after a day spent moving. I left the horse and the slips of our new olives and returned to the house where I finally found Jenny, slumped on some cushions in the middle of a thicket of packing boxes and newspaper we’d used for wrapping.
She smiled at me.
“Feel this,” she said.
I put my hand on her tummy.
The babies were both awake, and I could feel them kicking for the first time.
The Odyssey, originally sung in Greek, has a Latin counterpart. Virgil’s Aeneid, still unfinished when the author died in 19 BC, is also a classic quest story. Its hero, Aeneas, survives the fall of Troy and, like Odysseus, sets out on an epic adventure under the guidance of a divine being. Aeneas’s life coach is the goddess Venus, who also happens to be his mother.
The Odyssey and The Aeneid are chalk and cheese. If The Odyssey is a book about getting home to bed, The Aeneid is a book about getting out of it. In that distinction lies something essential about the difference between Greek and Roman culture. Greek culture finds its most natural expression in philosophy; Roman culture finds it in law.
We inhabit a culture that wants to tip us out of bed, to find our purpose in the big wide world, to make a mark. Greek philosophy has a stronger sense that purpose or meaning is part of the human hardware and comes free with every new person. It has a predilection for finding interior motivations, for seeking out a kind of harmony or balance or equilibrium that is precisely what many people mean when they use the word home, a far more resonant concept than a little piece of land buried under a big mortgage. In The Odyssey, ultimate purpose is found behind closed doors. In The Aeneid, it is the opposite.
The CliffsNotes version of The Aeneid runs something like this: Aeneas, a Trojan, survives the destruction of his city and sets sail, away from his home, to fulfill his sacred destiny, the establishment of an entirely new place called Rome. On the way, he and his crew encounter a storm, get shipwrecked, and end up on the shores of North Africa. Here Aeneas meets Dido, the founder and queen of Carthage, and despite her resolution that her first marriage to Sychaeus was more than enough for one lifetime, she falls in love with Aeneas. (Sychaeus had been killed by Dido’s jealous brother. Nice family.)
Take a look at the way the story is told. We don’t get the gory details of the last days of Troy, complete with Trojan horse, until Dido invites Aeneas to talk about it. One night, he agrees to open up about what he has been through, despite the fact that the hour is late and the stars themselves are starting to blink as though they can hardly keep their eyes open. Aeneas is part of a long line of storytellers whose purpose has been to cheat sleep of her due.
Often, English translations give the impression that Aeneas delivers his great story from a dais or stage. Really, he addresses his audience from an elevated bed. Once again, there is a long tradition of this. The bed, especially the deathbed, has often been used as a pulpit, a place from which to deliver ultimate truths, messages of sacred significance. The bed is the place for famous last words. On the day he died, Thomas Edison, for example, sat up and said, “It is very beautiful over there.” I’d like to think he was not so much dying as finding another project to work on in the next realm.
History does attest to the fact that some of the world’s great speech-makers reserved their most paltry efforts for their final scene. Winston Churchill’s last words were “I’m bored with it all.” His ally, Franklin Roosevelt, the man whose fireside radio talks sent Americans to bed under a blanket of thousands of words, died of a cerebral haemorrhage, slipping out on the tail of just five words: “I have a terrific headache.” Karl Marx died after he announced that “last words are for fools who haven’t said enough,” a criticism that certainly didn’t a
pply to him. In 1886, an unknown spinster called Emily Dickinson left the world before anyone had really noticed she was on it. As she passed, she said, “I must go in. The fog is rising.” J. M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, said, “I can’t sleep” and then died, which fixed the problem.
Aeneas also used his bed to great effect. It was more than a pulpit. In his case, it was a springboard, the place to launch his mission. The word that Virgil uses to describe the place from which Aeneas narrates the fall of Troy is torus, a slightly unusual word, the same word he likes to use for the marriage couch, a word with formal sexual connotations, as well as the funeral bier. Ironically, the usual Latin word for bed—the word Virgil doesn’t use here—survives in English as lectern, a place for reading rather than sleeping (although it can be both if your book isn’t much good). Aeneas’s storytelling, which is pretty gruesome at times, is an act of unwitting seduction and Dido is impressed. She is wounded, set on fire, poisoned, ignited, driven to madness, afflicted, et cetera. Virgil is in full flight when describing Dido’s emotional state. For a minute, she sounds a bit like Troy, which Aeneas also left smoldering.
Aeneas and Dido get it together, at least for a while.
But Aeneas’s mother is not happy.
It’s hard to argue when your mom is divine. Venus has a fight with Juno, Jupiter’s wife, who wants the lovebirds to make their nest in Carthage. Juno is present throughout The Aeneid as the goddess who wants to mess up the plans that fate has drawn up. Venus is always going to win. She is the mother-in-law from Hades.
Back on Earth, Aeneas can’t sleep. At the behest of his mother Venus, Anchises—the shade of his father—appears to him to tell him what to do. (Being married to a goddess, it seems, is no easier than having one for a mother.) Venus also gets Mercury—the god who, as one translator puts it, “gives sleep and takes sleep away”—to intervene. Aeneas must wake up, get on his way, leave the emotional Dido in her proper place, and establish the city that will, in turn, establish the rule of law over the earth. There is more to this than callow duty. We are watching a tussle between desire and law, and Virgil plays it masterfully. When Aeneas tells Dido that it is time for him to go, she turns on a scene and asks if he has time, at the very least, to leave her with a little Aeneas as a memento. He refuses, and she collapses on her bed. Aeneas receives one of the coldest endorsements in literature, one whose overtones of family, destiny, virtue, and loneliness are hard to convey in English: “At pius Aeneas.” But faithful Aeneas. It’s hard to translate the flint-like quality of these words. They turn passion to stone. Aeneas was always going to fulfill his destiny, but he left it until the eleventh hour.
What does Dido do? At night, after Aeneas has left, while Virgil sings a hymn to “gentle sleep” (the time when, in the rather florid translation of the 18th-century poet John Dryden, “Peace, with downy wings, was brooding on the ground”), Dido alone is awake. Even her insomnia is pictured as defiance of the laws of nature. She builds a fire and puts on it the clothes and weapons that you-know-who has left in her bedroom. Finally she throws the fire on the very bed she has recently shared with Aeneas. Virgil makes a point on a couple of occasions here of using the same uncommon word—torus—for Dido’s bed that he chose for the platform from which Aeneas delivers his seductive story.
Dido is not just burning her bed but also Aeneas’s place of rest. She calls down a curse on him and his people, an act of bitterness that legend supposed was the ultimate source of the war that was later to string across the Mediterranean between Rome and Carthage. Then she runs herself through with a sword and throws herself on the fire.
Beds are significant props in both The Odyssey and The Aeneid. Odysseus’s bed, carved from the trunk of that olive tree, is immovable, a place of stability, identity, and rest. In that epic, identity and rest are kindred ideas. But in The Aeneid, the bed gets burned, and Dido incinerates herself along with it. There is no rest for the good.
Among Aeneas’s descendents are the most famous twins in history: Romulus and Remus, the legendary founders of Rome. Their mother, Rhea Silvia, was a vestal virgin but, don’t worry—their father was a god, so she did not compromise her calling to chastity. But virgins who got pregnant could lose their lives. So the twins were put in a basket and sent down the Tiber, in a vivid case of being driven out of home. They were discovered by a she-wolf who suckled them and looked after them before a farmer intervened and restored them to human community. The story goes that when the she-wolf found them, their basket was safely caught in the roots of a fig tree. I like to imagine they were sound asleep.
The legend of Romulus and Remus is hard enough to believe in its entirety. But if you add the possibility that twins could be happily asleep at the same time and in the same place, it becomes the stuff of sheer fantasy. In my experience, it’s easier to believe the part about the breastfeeding wolf.
Once Jacob and Clare arrived in our lives, we soon found that lots of people had lots of opinions about the best way to look after twins. This is understandable because there are more and more twins around. The incidence of twins in western countries has almost doubled since 1980 and now accounts for about one in eighty births. This can be attributed to more than IVF; it’s also related to the fact that mothers are older these days, and even without medical intervention, an older woman is more likely to release two eggs in one cycle. I gather this is what happened to us. (Not that Jenny was old. I never said that. Let the record show that she wasn’t old then and she never will be.)
In the months leading up to Jacob and Clare’s birth, I read everything I could find. I was convinced that having twins wasn’t going to be so difficult after all. We traveled to the nearest big city to buy a pram and chose a serious piece of equipment that had been designed to the millimeter to fit through most doors, so long as you remembered to keep your knuckles out of the way. The woman who served us had been selling prams from the same store for over twenty years and had customers coming back whose mothers had dealt with her in the past. The expectant grandmothers stood to one side and listened while their daughters asked all the questions they had asked a generation before, thinking they were the first person to ever ask them. The woman said that when she started, a twins’ pram required a special order. Now she had four or five right there in the shop for us to choose from, a tribute to the increasing prevalence of twins as well as to the fact that people who have families later, even if they don’t have twins, may well have two children in a period of twelve months and they will need to be wheeled around together.
“Why this one?” I asked about the model she had selected for us. There were others with cup holders and even one with a facility for an MP3 player so that the babies could listen to Baby Einstein or Baby Mozart or something else that might give them an edge in life. I wondered why the woman wasn’t recommending one of these funkier versions.
“I get lots of feedback,” she said, “and the babies sleep best in this one.”
We had the credit card out of its holster before she needed to get to any other reasons.
We spoke to friends who had twins. They said the first six months would be unforgettable.
“Why?” we asked.
“Because you’ll be so exhausted, you won’t be able to remember a thing about them,” they told us.
But it wasn’t just the first six months. It was the first twelve months, a strange time that we longed to get through and at the same time wished would last forever. We wanted these two little bundles to grow up fast so that they could help themselves and let us get some sleep; at the same time, we hated the thought that they would ever change and stop needing us. It was a time of vulnerability for all concerned.
Whenever we were out, people who had twins approached us from all directions, wanting to remember when their own were little. We met parents whose twins were three, seven, fourteen, sixteen, twenty-four—you name it.
“My twins are fifty-five,” said one woman. “I’ve been looking at yours and thinking
back. It’s a beautiful memory. The time you have now is so precious. Don’t worry. Life will get easier. But it won’t get any better.”
On another occasion, Jenny was struggling to get three kids out of the car and into two prams. A woman came along and put money in the parking meter for her.
“I had twins, too,” said the woman, her kindness like the touch of a feather. She vanished before Jenny could burst into tears.
In addition to the shows of support we experienced when out and about, we recieived more than our fair share of unsolicited advice. In my early expeditions with Jacob and Clare, for example, I was told that they should be wearing hats. I would normally have agreed heartily with this suggestion except for the fact we were inside when it was made. A woman loomed up at me out of the dog food aisle. She had read something about the effect of fluorescent light on babies and was concerned.
“Cotton hats are fine,” she said. “Just plain cotton will do.”
Like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, she delivered her message and vanished.
This was so odd that I had to ring Jenny and let her know. While I was on the phone, another person interrupted to tell me that it was dangerous to talk on a mobile while pushing a shopping cart and that kids required my full attention, and if I wasn’t prepared to give it, then why did I have them in the first place.
“Technically, it was my wife who had them,” I replied, passing the buck as usual.
Another time, a woman noticed I was wiping their noses with an upward motion instead of a downward motion. She was concerned that I was pushing germs back up their noses and felt it incumbent upon her to let me know. Another time, a man came up behind me as I was putting the kids in the car because he thought I wasn’t fitting their restraints correctly. On a different occasion, I was sitting in a coffee shop and gave Clare— then almost nine months old–some of the froth off the top of my cappuccino, the part with a bit of chocolate sprinkled on it, as a small treat. But I chose the wrong moment. The woman at the next table went into action. Did I have any idea what caffeine could do to a child that age? Was I so stupid that I thought the froth on top was free of caffeine? Did I have any appreciation of what caffeine could do to the cognitive development of a child? Did I realize that sleep deprivation was an officially recognized form of torture? I should have said that I was the one being deprived of sleep, but I was simply too tired to come up with the retort at the time and only thought of it at a quarter to twelve at night when it was too late.
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