“We never set out to be wanderers,” explained the mother. “I guess it just happened.”
“It didn’t just happen,” said the dad. “Nothing just happens.”
You meet philosophers everywhere.
The mother explained that when their twins were little, the only place they could get them to sleep was in the car. So they started doing longer and longer trips, switching off driving so that one would drive while the other got some shut-eye in the passenger seat.
Over time, this had become a lifestyle. Ten years later, they were still driving around. They had done countless thousand miles.
“We’ve been back to Perth a few times, but I can’t sleep at home anymore,” said Dad. “So we’ve rented the house. That’s how we pay the bills. We teach the kids ourselves. If they need to know about something, we drive there. It’s better than looking it up on the Net.”
About that time, a Cambodian woman turned up in town with her two sons. It appeared that some kind of arrangement had been brokered with one of the older bachelors in town, and suddenly these three people arrived looking as though they had landed on another planet, unable to understand ordinary English let alone the granite dialect used in our district. The newcomers spent a lot of time indoors. The mother found work on a chicken farm an hour away packing the eggs laid by battery hens, bringing home cartons of chipped ones that could be eaten but not sold. She started at 5:00 AM and had to leave home in the early hours to get there. The stepfather took little interest in the boys; as a matter of fact, he didn’t take much interest in anything and locals were surprised that he had heard of Cambodia let alone managed to recruit a partner from there. Each day, the elder boy caught the bus over to the local high school where there was no kind of support for someone in his predicament. The poor kid was spending most of the day sitting in the corridor. When the bus returned in the afternoon, his eyes would be fixed straight in front, his head turned to stone. The younger boy seemed to cope better; he was still at an age where you can catch a language a bit like catching a cold.
Their neighbor Tony was appalled by the older boy’s suffering and decided to do something. He did some research and discovered that a school in Canberra had a program for students who struggled with English. But there was no bus to get there. So Tony organized a car pool, approaching various people who went to the city for work. At the time, I was doing some work at the university, so a couple of afternoons a week I’d pick up the young man in our old red car with a clock on the dashboard that had died at 1:30 AM ages before. The boy greeted me with a curt nod, pulled his seat belt around himself like a zen master pulling on a robe and, within one hundred meters, was fast asleep, sitting perfectly upright. He never moved for the whole journey, his head grazing the low roof of the car. When we got home an hour later, the dashboard clock said it was still 1:30. Time had stood still, just like in the fairy tales. The boy always woke at the same point as we came into town. He said good-bye with a small nod and disappeared into the stepfather’s house. Tony explained that the young man had spent time in a monastery when he was a boy and his disciplined posture was a legacy of this. But the ability to use sleep to control reality was a skill he had developed all on his own. I wondered what kind of trauma his refugee experience brought with it.
At the end of the year, his mother appeared in our driveway with two cartons of eggs.
“I thank you,” she said solemnly. “I thank you for my boy.”
None of those eggs were chipped.
Three years later, the boy was studying architecture at a university in another state. He was a different character now, all because Tony went out of his way to make sure there were cars for him to sleep in.
As much as it is true that trauma can disrupt sleep, there are circumstances in which certain trauma can induce excessive sleep, almost as though the mind were closing down to protect itself. I thought this was happening to the boy. It can certainly happen to prisoners. There have been stories in the media of asylum seekers, who have been held indefinitely in off-shore detention centers by the Australian government, sleeping for fifteen hours a day, an image of hopelessness and despair. There is a fascinating documentary called Chasing Asylum made by filmmaker Eva Orner. It uses footage that has been surreptitiously obtained from these off-shore processing centers on Manus Island and Nauru; many of the characters need to remain anonymous. The film shows people with nothing to do but sleep. They sleep to the point of self-extinction.
I once met a Chinese priest, Archbishop Dominic Tang, who had spent twenty-two years in jail (in my opinion, for no good reason), much of it in solitary confinement. He was less that five feet tall and exuded a deep gentleness, but he was made of tough stuff. When asked how he’d coped, he said he put himself onto the monastic regime he’d learned as a novice so that he would have a different task, usually spiritual, to perform every hour or half hour. He made a structure for his day. He washed and shaved slowly, deliberately, consciously.
“Otherwise sleep too much,” he said in broken English.
Experts have counted two hundred or more references to sleep in the work of William Shakespeare. This level of interest is striking until you learn that Shakespeare and his wife, Anne Hathaway, had twins: a boy and a girl, Judith and Hamnet, who were born in February 1585, twenty-one months after the birth of their first child, Susanna. (Tragically, Hamnet died at the tender age of just eleven.) The presence of twins surely put sleep high on Shakespeare’s agenda, not to mention the extraordinary pressure of time under which he worked both day and night. On the other hand, maybe Shakespeare took such a vigorous interest in sleep simply because he took a vigorous interest in just about everything.
It’s hard to escape the conclusion that Shakespeare’s slumbering Falstaff, described in Henry IV Part 1 as a “bed-presser” and a “huge hill of flesh” suffers from sleep apnea, aggravated by grog. When Peto finds him “fast asleep behind the arras and snorting like a horse,” Prince Hal remarks, “Hark how hard he fetches breath.” Shakespeare describes him with textbook accuracy.
On the other hand, Julius Caesar asks to be surrounded by men “that are fat” and “such as sleep at nights.” In this case, Shakespeare was mistaken if he thought fat people are better, as opposed to longer, sleepers. They only look that way, as anyone with sleep apnea will tell you. But if he was saying that better sleepers make better leaders, he may well have had a point. Brutus, one of the traitors, does not sleep on the night before he joins the assassination.
Sleep is a character in a number of Shakespeare’s plays and poems. In The Tempest, Prospero says:
We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
His “Sonnet XXVII” also begins with a nod to nocturnal routines:
Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,
The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;
But then begins a journey in my head
To work my mind, when body’s work’s expired.
In Macbeth, there’s also a fine speech in praise of sleep, delivered at the very moment when Macbeth kills the king:
Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
It is curious that Macbeth delivers these thoughts before he even tries to wipe the blood off his hands, but sleep was obviously something that weighed on Shakespeare’s mind. When Macbeth starts to fall apart, his wife doesn’t attribute his poor state of mind to the bloodbath he has created in the pursuit of power. She simply tells him, “You lack the season of all natures, sleep.”
Whether it was caused by parenting-induced exhaustion or not, Shakespeare had a fascination with sleep that never left him. He even made specific mention in his will, bequeathing to his wife Anne “the second-best bed with the furniture.” (Most opinions
concur that “the furniture” means the bed linen; the idea of a second-best bed is more confusing. Scholars have been divided between those who regard the second-best bed as second-best—and hence claim the will was a slight to Anne—and those who regard it, for various recondite reasons, as really the best. Among their arguments is the claim that the best bed was the one kept for guests but this was really second-best, because any couple with a brain kept the best bed for themselves but had visitors believe it was second-best.)
A bed is a bit like a family dining table. It bears many stories. Yet some cultures and some people are coy about beds, perhaps because of their association with sex. In the famous comedy I Love Lucy, Lucy and her husband, Ricky, always had separate beds. If Ricky was in bed, he’d be reading the paper with his pajamas ironed and buttoned up to his neck; if Lucy was in bed, she’d be fully robed and wearing lipstick. That was considered proper.
But a bed is not just a piece of furniture; people seldom feel as intimately attached to, say, a couch as they do to a bed. For most of the story of sleep, the efforts of bed builders have gone into appearances rather than anything else; this is strange because a bed does its best work in the dark. But beds have needed to fulfill both public and private purposes, and where these have been in tension, the public seem to have taken precedence. When Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in 1922, the discoverers were impressed by his range of beds, made from precious materials such as ivory, ebony, and gold and featuring elaborate carvings of cats, included more for their sacredness than their sleepiness. Comfort isn’t such an important factor for the dead, whose backs are as bad as they’re going to get. While alive, Henry VIII—a big bloke—had a bed that was over three square meters. (He did have six wives but not all at once. The bed was more about making a statement to the underlings.) Meanwhile, Louis XIV of France had 413 beds.
Of course, no matter what other purposes they might serve, beds still serve their primary service as places to sleep. The expression “sleep tight” comes from a practice, developed in restoration England, of putting a mattress on a lattice of ropes that would then be pulled tight to provide both comfort and firmness. The method also worked to discourage unwanted visitors, such as rodents. It is from this custom that we get the saying “Good night, sleep tight. Don’t let the bedbugs bite.”
Besides the threats of insomnia and bad dreams, bedbugs are perhaps the worst nightime visitor. The common bedbug, Cimex lectularius, is a resilient little bugger. A typical bedbug measures less than five millimeters across and is flat, making it apt to fit in the tiniest places. It wouldn’t be such a nuisance if it just ate waste, as the demonstrator implied, but it’s a little Dracula, sucking blood by night, injecting victims with both an anticoagulant and an anesthetic when it does so. This means that you don’t feel the dreadful itch until well after the burglar has come and gone, often leaving the tap still running so that you find blood spots on the mattress. Bedbugs are patient. They can remain dormant for eighteen months between feeds. Despite popular myth, they work across barriers of income and class. The introduction of steel beds led to a decrease in their prevalence, as did cotton sheets because they could be boiled. But pest control experts are at a loss to explain why bedbugs have become so numerous once again over the last few years. They breed like bugs.
Many people share a bed, but everybody sleeps alone. Sleep, like death, is a door you can only go through on your own.
During the final week in which I was working as a priest, I was called to a suburban motel in the middle of the morning because a woman had woken that day to find her husband dead in the bed beside her. The pair had been married for fifty years and never slept apart. They had traveled together and, every year, made a pilgrimage to the city for the Spring Racing Carnival where they always stayed in the same room at the same inexpensive motel. It was a second home to them, so much so that once they had found the previous year’s racing slip under the bed, where it had remained undisturbed for twelve months.
They were a devoted, if eccentric, couple. The receptionist who greeted me said that the woman was coping with remarkable composure. Around 8:00 AM, she had rung the front office and asked if it were too late to change the order for two breakfasts to one breakfast.
“May I ask why?” inquired the receptionist.
“Oh, it’s just that my husband is dead in the bed,” the woman apparently replied.
A doctor was called, who duly pronounced that the husband must have passed away about half past one.
“I don’t think so,” said the woman. “I was watching TV then. I would have noticed.”
Then they called me, the priest, and I was asked to sit a few minutes with the body while the widow slipped into the little bathroom to apply her makeup.
“Thanks for waiting,” she said. “I want to look my best. You can put the TV on if you want, although there’s not much on at the moment, I don’t think. I was channel surfing before you arrived.”
Twenty minutes later she emerged and we were just getting ready to start prayers when somebody arrived to service the room.
“Would you mind coming back to make the bed later?” asked the widow. “I’m afraid my husband is still in bed.”
“No problem,” the maid replied. “I’ll come back later.”
“Thank you,” said the widow, adding, “We may need fresh sheets.”
We knelt by the bedside, and as we prayed, the woman reached across and held the hand of her dead husband, a gesture I found comforting despite the fact that it wasn’t supposed to be me who needed comfort. It was the first sign that the body in the bed was anything more to her than a stage prop. Later, I tried to suggest to her that she might be in shock because someone so familiar to her—a person who had shared her bed for fifty years—had just slipped away without so much as ruffling the sheets.
“That,” she replied, “is the sign of a really good mattress.”
Even for the living, sleep can be a profound form of absence. That’s why Santa and the tooth fairy and the sandman all come at night; they know that your body is in the bed but that you yourself have slipped out for a moment, so they can do their thing.
Some years ago, when I was still in the order, I received a call from the police station. A homeless man had wandered into the station and handed my wallet across the counter. I thanked the officer but told him that this was impossible as my wallet was in my beside drawer where I had put it the night before.
At the time, I was living in a terrace house belonging to a religious community. My bedroom was upstairs and at the back; access was provided by a flight and a half of creaky stairs, and the door was so tight in the jam that often it needed a shoulder to persuade it to let anyone in. The room was so small that everyone assumed it had once been servants’ quarters and that the servants had been a chaste breed: a single narrow bed all but filled the space, leaving room only for a wardrobe at the foot of the bed and a small table on the other side of the bed from the door. To get to the table, you had to shuffle sideways like a crab around the bed and past the wardrobe.
“I’m sorry, officer,” I said, “but it simply can’t be my wallet.” I didn’t go into the salubrious details of religious accommodation. “It must belong to someone else,” I said.
However, just to be sure, I went upstairs to check. My keys were in the drawer where I had put them. And my sunglasses were in the place where I emptied my pockets every night. But the wallet was gone. I rang the officer back.
“I think I need to come and see this wallet,” I told him.
It turns out that the man had come into my room in the early hours of the night, slipped around the bed, and pilfered the wallet—all while I was asleep. I never noticed a thing.
“Where were you all this time?” asked the officer.
“I was in bed,” I told him. “Asleep.”
“You may as well have been anywhere,” he said.
“I suppose.”
I retrieved my wallet and went back home. When tellin
g one of my brethren about what had happened, I marveled at the fact that the man had known to come into my room.
“He probably just followed the snoring,” the priest said.
Florence Nightingale spent most of her long life in bed. This is not the way she is usually remembered. Her bed became a stage on which she performed her austere eccentricity.
In March 1855, a man named Alexis Soyer arrived to assist Nightingale at the Barrack Hospital in Scutari (now Üsküdar), a small town across the strait from Constantinople. It was here that casualties were being ferried, across the Black Sea from battles fought in places such as Balaclava, Sevastopol, and Inkerman. Soyer, a Frenchman, had come to the Crimean War at his own expense to help an English woman. Soyer was a man with a taste for the finer things and had made his name as the chef at London’s Reform Club, a high-class venue, where he had worked since its opening in 1837. (The wager that sends Jules Verne’s Phileas Fogg and his valet Passepartout around the world in eighty days was laid at the Reform Club; J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan, was later to be elected a member.)
Following the death of his wife, Elizabeth, in 1842, Soyer had taken himself to Ireland to feed the hungry. There he had invented a kind of soup kitchen suited to the needs of the destitute. He soon wanted the whole world to sit at his table; his books had visionary titles such as Soyer’s Charitable Cookery and A Shilling Cookery for the People. On the way to the Crimea, Soyer stopped off in Marseilles in order to inveigle a recipe for bouillabaisse out of a rival kitchen, but it was not a recipe he was going to be able to use immediately. The sick and wounded soldiers for whom he had decided he was going to cook at Scutari had, in the previous twelve months, been close to starvation. The only reason most of them didn’t die of hunger was that disease got them first.
Soyer had learned about what was going on in the Crimea in the same way that the rest of England found out: he read the paper. The invention of the telegraph meant that news of military disaster and administrative ineptitude now reached the taxpaying public with what was, for the authorities at least, uncomfortable speed. The previous October, correspondents for the Times (London) such as William Russell and Thomas Chenery had alerted the public to the gross neglect of the injured, most of whom were “left to expire in agony.” Chenery commented that “the commonest appliances of a work-house sick ward are wanting, and that the men must die through the medical staff of the British army having forgotten that old rags are necessary for the dressing of wounds.” The hospital was portrayed as a morgue. Readers were outraged, and their reaction, both in its immediacy and intensity, marked a shift in public sensibility: they were beginning to think of ordinary soldiers less as beasts of burden, with few interests beyond sex and sleep, and more as heroes, or at least figures of sympathy. Unfortunately, their commanders were slow to pick up on this change; most of them had more feeling for livestock than for their men. Sidney Herbert, the Minister at War, decided that the only person who could do something about the appalling conditions was his friend, Florence Nightingale, who had infuriated her well-heeled family some years earlier by taking up nursing.
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