In 1864, Nightingale wrote “Note on the Aboriginal Races of Australia” to be delivered as a paper at the annual meeting of the National Association for the Promotion of Social Science, held in York that year. Heaven only knows how and why she got involved in this discussion, although her attitude shows her signature sharpness. She was never afraid to have a point of view:
In their present state, very few of the human race are lower in the scale of civilisation than these poor people: excepting indeed those who trample upon and oppress them—who introduce among them the vices of European (so-called) civilisation.
What is more interesting is the characteristic way in which she sorts out the situation of indigenous Australians according to her own religious agenda, one in which God is needed to provide a clear sense of duty. Her religion was a prophylactic against loss of control. It was all about work, not rest:
In dealing with uncivilised races it has hitherto been too often the case that the Roman Catholic Missionary has believed: “sprinkle this child with Holy water and then the sooner it dies the better” and that the Protestant Missionary has believed “make this child capable of understanding the truths of religion and then our work is done.” But the wiser Missionary of this day says: “What is the use of reading and writing to the natives—it does not give him a living. Show him his duty to God. And teach him how to plough. Otherwise, he does but fall into vice worse than before. Ceres comes before Minerva.
Yet, all her efforts did not succeed in putting the world in order. There was a rough sea that kept lapping around the feet of her bed. In the mid 1870s, Nightingale was lying in bed, watching the shapes cast by her nightlight. She got to thinking about Scutari and sat up to write herself a note: “Am I she who once stood on that Crimean height? ‘The lady with the lamp shall stand.’ The lamp shows me only my utter shipwreck.”
In the year before Florence Nightingale was born, John Keats wrote his wonderful “Ode to a Nightingale,” a poem in which the bird is an elusive symbol of immortality. Like a number of the so-called romantic poets, Keats had a fascination with sleep, an experience that provided a handy gray area between consciousness and unconsciousness, between reality and unreality. Another example is Wordsworth’s “A slumber did my spirit seal,” a beguiling short poem that struggles with both mortality and immortality, and also Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner in which the storyteller gains a moment’s respite from his story:
Oh sleep! it is a gentle thing,
Beloved from pole to pole!
To Mary Queen the praise be given!
She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,
That slid into my soul.
Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” ends with a confused return from reverie to reality: “Was it a vision, or a waking dream? / Fled is that music:— Do I wake or sleep?”
Florence Nightingale asked herself the same question: Was this life a form of waking or sleeping? Her worst fear was to resemble Keats’s bird that “wast not born for death.” When friends told her that she had become immortal, that countless thousands of young girls had been named after her, she couldn’t react. On return from the Crimean War, she fully expected to die within the next year or two. It was a source of confusion to her that she didn’t and that she lived on and on and on. Like the voice in Keats’s poem, she was “half in love with easeful Death.”
The nightingale is the opposite of the lark; it sings at night. Yet a better emblem of Florence Nightingale is Shakespeare’s “obscure bird,” the night bird that doesn’t sing. One of the closest relationships Florence formed was with an owl called Athena. She found Athena on a visit to the Parthenon in Greece in 1850, a period in her young life in which she was badly sleep-deprived and in which she was obsessed by her proclivity for dreaming. “I had no wish on earth but to sleep,” she wrote. “I lay in bed and called on God to save me.” So, at the home of Western philosophy, God sent her an owl, which slept in her pocket and soon ate her pet cicada, whom she had named Plato. Athena, named after the goddess of the philosopher’s city who is often represented by an owl, died the week before Nightingale left for Crimea; Florence blamed her sister Parthe for killing Athena. Soon after, as Florence was beginning to come to grips with the enormity of the task at Scutari, Parthe sent her an illustrated biography of the poor bird, which she had written. When the soldiers discovered Nightingale’s secret grief, they tried to find her another owl.
Legend has it that the owl is too wise to sleep. It is, like Florence Nightingale, wide-eyed. When Keats wrote “To Sleep,” he prayed for respite from his own mind:
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,—
Save me from curious Conscience that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like the mole;
Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.
The cliché-makers like to tell us that bed should be kept for sleep and sex and nothing else. They have a point. There is a discipline called sleep hygiene that teaches that we can improve our sleep by having a less-cluttered sleep space, that a bedroom should be furnished with a kind of sacred minimalism. So no TV in the bedroom, no laptops or briefcases. No eating in bed either. The bed is an altar, and sleep needs to be attended by certain safe rituals, all of which move the body and soul to a point of surrender, not least by being familiar, unchanging, and, therefore, comforting. What the sleep sanitation people forget to mention is that sleep and sex are cousins. This is why a place that is bad for one tends to be bad for the other as well. But the two activities have a deeper affinity: you reach both of them over the lip of a cliff, and you have to let go in order to fall into either. Both sleep and sex are places where the ego can lose its stranglehold on your identity—experiences in which, if you are lucky, you can hand over the keys to your own being.
Florence Nightingale achieved more in bed than the vast majority of people achieve out of it. She spent years in bed not sleeping and saved thousands of lives in the process; both her energy and her lack of it could be staggering. There is plenty owing to this nightingale. At the same time, she is a bundle of contradictions. She believed that God called her to anonymous and thankless service, yet she kept fierce control of her life, narrowing it down to an area of six feet by three in order that she could save the whole world. Her problem was that the lady with the lamp could never escape her own shadow.
As he approached his fourth birthday, we decided it was time for our Benedict to start making his own bed. All we wanted him to do was to pull up his blankets and put his pajamas under his pillow. We soon lightened up on the second requirement, as the pillow was needed to shelter all the little toys that Benny took with him on the journey to the Land of Nod, so there wasn’t much room left for pajamas. We concentrated instead on getting him to arrange the blankets neatly. He was resistant to the idea.
“If God made the world,” he asked, “why can’t he make my bed?”
It’s not a bad question. I wish I knew the answer.
“God made the world so you’d have a place to make your bed,” I ventured, not really sure of my theological footing but relieved that Benny was at least prepared to think about what I’d said.
“So why does Mummy make your bed?” he asked.
Bed-making is one of our culture’s more curious forms of behavior. I suppose that just as we need reassuring rituals to get us into bed, so too do we need them to get us out of it again. Making the bed is a way of putting the world in order at the start of another day. It is a comforting work of fiction. In a few minutes, you can impose order and regularity on the tangle of sheets and blankets that represent the third of your life over which you have least control, the hours you’ve spent in the Land of Nod.
I thought that perhaps our Benny needed the firm hand of Florence Nightingale, a demon for making beds. She was the mother of that fine innovation in the deployment of bed linen, the hospital corner. She wrote, “A true nurse will always make her patient
’s bed carefully herself.”
But a four-year-old is too young for Nightingale. And so we simply tried to explain that a new day was a wonderful thing containing lots to look forward to and making your bed was a way of getting ready for it.
That night, Benny appeared between us in our bed. I looked across to the clock radio. It was 2:06 AM.
“Benny,” I said as mildly as possible, “it’s nice to see you, but you have your own bed so why don’t you go back there.”
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve already made it.”
Not long afterward, we read about the International Exhibition of Inventions, in Geneva, where an Italian engineer called Enrico Berruti exhibited a machine that he had been working on for ages. It was a bed that made itself, including straightening the duvet and tightening the undersheet. Berruti had devoted years to saving a few minutes. We thought he’d get along fine with our Benny.
In the history of understanding sleep, there is a tension between control and surrender. Is sleep an orderly experience, something reflected in the image of a neatly made bed? Or is it the opposite, a daily encounter with a mysterious realm beyond our consciousness? The demands of life, for most people, seem to be ever increasing. We put more and more effort into staying in control. As always, the way we live affects the way we sleep and the way we think about sleep.
It was Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver’s Travels, who first referred to sleep as “the Land of Nod.” Our children loved Gulliver’s Travels, which had also been a bedtime favorite of mine.
On the whole, it is an invigorating experience when you first encounter a story as a child and then discover it all over again as an adult, possibly even at different stages of adulthood, each time stretching your imagination to reach new places. It’s like learning to play in the safety of shallow water before you gain enough understanding and respect of the forces around you to move into the deep. We all pay an enormous price when people first encounter their sacred texts, such as the Bible or the Qur’an, as children but then never learn to read them as adults. Sacred texts need deep water; in the hands of fundamentalists, they are like whales stranded on a beach, thrashing about dangerously, gasping for air.
In my own childhood bedtime reading, Gulliver’s Travels is paired in my memory with Robinson Crusoe, the original version of which was written by Daniel Defoe. Defoe was a prototype of what came to be known as a journalist. He also had sidelines as a spy and an insurance salesman; his eye was as sharp as Swift’s, but Defoe was not so much appalled by the human condition as Swift was, as ready to make a buck out of it. He did humanity the disservice of taking it far too seriously.
Robinson Crusoe, written in 1719, and Gulliver’s Travels, written in 1728, have a few things in common. They were written within the space of a few years of each other and are both fantasies of exploration and discovery. They both use the kind of narratives that reached their apotheosis in the reality TV series Survivor. In addition, they both also have extraordinarily long titles, enough to put any librarian off their lunch. Swift’s book is called Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World. In Four Parts by Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, then a Captain of Several Ships. Not to be outdone, Defoe’s is called The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver’d by Pyrates. It sounds more like the title of a bill before Congress than an adventure story. But despite their similarities, Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe are born from radically different understandings of the world. And different views of humanity can be seen in different attitudes to sleep.
When the eponymous Robinson Crusoe finally comes ashore on his castaway island, he immediately starts putting his new world in order. He realizes that he is defenseless, and with undaunted logic, he establishes a safe place for his bed in “a thick bushy tree.” Defoe writes,
And having drank, and put a little tobacco into my mouth to prevent hunger, I went to the tree, and getting up into it, endeavoured to place myself so that if I should sleep I might not fall. And having cut me a short stick, like a truncheon, for my defense, I took up my lodging; and having been excessively fatigued, I fell fast asleep, and slept as comfortably as, I believe, few could have done in my condition, and found myself more refreshed with it than, I think, I ever was on such an occasion.
Crusoe is the embodiment of what used to be called Protestant work ethic, a sturdy and, in many ways, admirable approach to life. It is evident, for example, in the practice of putting clocks on church towers. Religion is supposed to be about timelessness, but when there’s a clock on the steeple, there is a caveat: yes, we believe in eternity, which is why the steeple points so high, but here below you still have to keep an eye on the time and use it prudently. Crusoe often talks about God and the way the Almighty has looked after him and so on, but the reader becomes increasingly skeptical about this. In point of fact, he is a self-made man. His first bed typifies his whole mind-set. He uses reason to rig up safe bedding in a hostile world and is rewarded with sound sleep. As the book goes on, we find that Crusoe can do anything by the combined power of reason and hard work, even overcome mental illness. He comments, “my reason began now to master my despondency.” Thousands of people might wish it were so easy. He is never really alone on his island because he is a one-man civilization. The whole point of the novel is that a rational creature “not bred to any trade” has the capacity to re-create the entire apparatus of European civilization. Crusoe does this without a flicker of self-doubt.
Crusoe is obsessed with time and its correct measurement. For him, sleep is not just a personal experience, designed for the well-being of the individual. It is also how we measure the passage of days, and these build into weeks, months, and years—and ultimately into what we call history. Every child knows how many nights it is till Christmas or their birthday. This aspect of sleep is far more important to Crusoe than any of its restorative qualities; indolence is a sin and sleep can be a Trojan horse bringing sloth and laziness into the world. The measurement of time is instrumental in bringing order to existence. Robinson Crusoe (if I may use the abbreviated title) is replete with the counting of days, the numbering of history. Crusoe keeps the Sabbath religiously (I am not sure how else it could be kept) and is distraught when he thinks it is possible he has been observing it on the wrong day; he is also punctilious about his diary. More than anything, when he eventually finds a companion, he calls the man Friday because that is the day on which he found him. Friday is named after a measurement of time. If he’d been found one sleep earlier, he would have been called Thursday.
In Gulliver’s Travels, when Lemuel Gulliver comes ashore in Lilliput, he, too, is ready for sleep. But here it is a completely different story.
The children’s version of Gulliver’s Travels tends to include Lilliput (where people were small) and Brobdingnag (where they were big) but leaves out the parts that are complex and dark, meaning most of Jonathan Swift’s original work. Gulliver’s Travels is not exactly lighthearted. It is funny, sometimes hilarious, but the humor tears strips off the follies of the human animal. In the bedtime version, the little Lilliputians were cute, and when he reaches Brobdingnag, to the giants it is Gulliver who becomes like the Lillputians and also seems cute. This was far from Swift’s intention. The idea of cuteness had no place in his view of the world, nor did ideas such as “sweet” or “delightful.” Swift was one of the most savage satirists ever to have put poison in their ink. Just consider his short piece A Modest Proposal, which suggests ending famine in Ireland by eating children. Its logic and structure are so impeccable that they end up calling into doubt the functions of logic and structure themselves; this is precisely what Swift intended. He creates an unarguable case that is patently absurd. H
is use of reason leads to crazy results. Lucky for the pretentious of the world that he did not live past 1745, having endured several years of dementia, a fate he always dreaded. He is buried in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, an establishment of which he had been the dean. He wrote his own epitaph, which reads angry indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Swift is one of those who only find rest in death.
Swift was born in 1667, a year after the Great Fire of London, a calamity that may well have been the result of poor sleep. It is said to have begun in a bakery in Pudding Lane just after midnight on September 2 that year, caused by sparks that escaped the fire. (The phrase “just after midnight” is the clue. It suggests that some poor soul had been left to keep an eye on the oven but had nodded off.) However, there were plenty of folk who wanted to blame the fire on terrorists. England was engaged in a war at the time and spies were thought to have crept up the Thames and set fires. The likely real cause was more mundane and less newsworthy— just a simple accident in the bakery.
The Great Fire destroyed thousands and thousands of houses and almost ninety churches, including a great and labyrinthine cathedral. It may have been one of the factors that contributed to Swift’s sense of the fragility of civilization. For him, civilization was brittle; the human ego, in contrast, was virtually unbreakable.
There is a great fire in Gulliver’s Travels, one that threatens the palace of Lilliput. Gulliver stirs from sleep and pisses on it to put it out. This is no ordinary piss. Swift likes us to know that it is the first piss of morning, that pungent and powerful concoction that your body brews while you’re asleep. In Gulliver’s case, it is all the more offensive because he has been drinking the night before. The palace is saved, but the king is offended because pissing within the royal precinct is illegal.
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