Snooze
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Just under twenty years later, in 1852—a period during which his marriage to Catherine was unraveling after the pair had had ten children, one of whom had sadly died—Dickens wrote a piece called “Lying Awake” for the magazine he edited, Household Words. He says that, since he was a “very small boy,” he was familiar with Benjamin Franklin’s “paper on the art of procuring pleasant dreams,” the one in which he urged insomniacs to have two beds. Dickens did not find Franklin’s advice very helpful, writing, “I have performed the whole ceremony and if it were possible for me to be more saucer-eye than I was before, that was the only result that came of it.”
Dickens runs through the disjointed chain of thought that filled the hours of his insomnia before reaching the conclusion that he would afterward stick to:
I found I had been lying awake so long that the very dead began to wake too, and to crowd into my thoughts most sorrowfully. Therefore I resolved to lie awake no more, but to get up and go out for a night walk—which resolution was an acceptable relief to me, as I dare say it may prove to a great many more.
Dickens loved the hours when he could have London all to himself, especially the time between when the church clocks struck three and when they struck four. He wrote an article in 1860 for All the Year Round, the magazine he edited after he fell out with the management of Household Words, about “the restlessness of a great city and the way in which it tumbles and tosses before it can get to sleep.” “Night Walks” is a guided tour through London on a cold night in March after the last of the public houses have sent their patrons home. Dickens walks and walks and walks, weaving through the “interminable tangle of streets,” stopping outside the Debtors’ Door of Newgate Prison (“which has been Death’s Door to so many”), a place that had been the source of special fear and loathing in his life. As a church bell strikes three, he stumbles over a sleeping kid of about twenty, and the two are terrified of each other. As another bell peals four, he enters a dark and empty theater and gropes his way to the stage. After four, he could get coffee and toast at Covent Garden, but he needed to wake the stall holder; Dickens remarks that the fruit and vegetables at Covent Garden get treated better than the people who sell it.
There is a touching moment when Dickens stops outside the walls of Bethlehem, a place that has given the word bedlam to the language. Bethlehem was a prison that should have been a hospital; it housed people whose minds had frayed to such an extent that even the frayed streets of London couldn’t accommodate them. Dickens wryly suggests that he is not much different from one of the inmates on the other side of the wall whom he once met; this man used to believe Queen Victoria dined with him in her pajamas. Dickens finds fellow feeling with the man in the reflection that no mind will do its owner’s bidding while the owner is asleep:
Are not the sane and the insane equal at night as the sane lie a dreaming? Are not all of us outside this hospital, who dream, more or less in the condition of those inside it, every night of our lives.
Tired and ready for bed, Dickens would go home at sunrise and sleep soundly. He didn’t lose sleep over insomnia; he used it to spend time with his love, the city.
The anxiety caused by insomnia can have worse effects than the insomnia itself. After centuries of experimenting with drugs, tonics, aromatherapy, and hot bedtime drinks, some of the best advice to those who can’t sleep is often to stop trying to sleep and, at the very least, to stop looking at the clock. Insomnia loves attention; deprived of this, it occasionally sulks and goes away. I once knew a nurse who said that patients in the hospital were regularly plagued by poor sleep. It is curious, given the importance of sleep to both physical and psychological healing, that hospitals are among the hardest places in the world to get any. My friend used to walk the wards in the small hours, noticing the number of eyes looking for something to look at. She’d switch on the televisions that hung over the beds, turning down the volume. Twenty minutes or half an hour later, she would go around the ward again: the patients would now have nodded off, and she’d turn off the screens. There are times when the best form of attack is surrender.
By the time she was three and a bit, we had realized that Clare was a strong character and a good talker. She went to bed chatting, could often be heard in the night talking to one of her many cuddly friends, and got up in the morning still halfway through the paragraph she had put on hold when she went to sleep. She threw herself into anything she did and sometimes threw toys, books, and furniture into it as well.
One day, Jenny discovered that a well-known ballet school was giving lunchtime performances in a hall not far from our new home. It seemed too good to miss. Our children all loved dancing, even if for the boys, now aged five and three, dancing usually meant getting dressed up as pirates and terrorizing each other with swords. Clare was disdainful of such crude approaches. When she wanted to dance, she put on her pink slippers, her Snow White dress, and (admittedly) her pirate hat and twirled around on the rug in the lounge, indignant when the boys failed to respect her performance space. We were in a house full of pirates. Clare had decided that she was a princess pirate, a higher order of being than a captain or cabin boy, but a pirate nonetheless.
The ballet school was performing scenes from Don Quixote, which meant we had to break the news that while Don Quixote fought with windmills he was not, strictly speaking, a pirate as he had a horse rather than a ship. The boys showed great tolerance and agreed to go anyway, as long as they could dress up as pirates. We were a little hesitant because we had recently taken them to see The Pirates of Penzance at the school where I worked and they had dressed for the occasion. They loved the show but it was all we could do to stop them jumping up and joining in; Jake cried at the end because he wanted to put it on again and see it all over like a DVD. That’s the problem with live theater, same as with live anything. It ends.
Don Quixote is a famous victim of sleeplessness. At the beginning of his adventures, we learn that the lovable knight with the sad face has spent so much time reading books about chivalry, the pulp fiction of the time, that he sits up from dusk to dawn, and as a result of not sleeping, his brain has either dried up or withered (depending on the translation) and he has gone mad, losing the useful ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. The idea of a brain drying up through lack of sleep is resonant. The word “exhaustion” originates in the Latin word haustus, meaning “drink,” particularly with the connotation of drinking deeply or drinking right up. The suggestion is not that drink leads to tiredness. Rather, being exhausted means that you have been drunk to the lees, that every drop has been squeezed out of you. We frequently meet Don Quixote keeping vigil through the night for some daft purpose or other. Throughout his struggles, people often try to get him to have a lie down and a good sleep, not least his trusting friend, Sancho, who has things to say on the subject, culled from his inexhaustible fund of proverbs and aphorisms. In chapter XLIII, he says, “When we’re asleep, we’re all the same, great and small, rich and poor.” Later, in chapter LXVIII, he imparts this bit of wisdom regarding sleep:
All I do know is that so long as I am asleep I am rid of all fears and hopes and toils and glory, and long live the man who invented sleep, the cloak that covers all human thoughts, the food that takes away hunger, the water that chases away thirst, the fire that warms the cold, the cold that cools the heat and, in short, the universal coinage that can buy anything, the scales and weights that make the shepherd the equal of the king and the fool the equal of the wise man. There’s only one drawback about sleep, so I’ve heard — it’s like death, because there’s very little difference between a man who’s asleep and one who’s dead.
In Don Quixote, the devil is always tagged as the one who never sleeps, the saboteur of the human spirit. At the end of his days, the knight of sorrowful countenance returns home and his doctor diagnoses depression and despondency. He gets into bed and, at long last, has a decent sleep. When he wakes up, his mind is free and clear, the shadows have vanished and he re
alizes that he has been living in an artificial world, that all the silly fantasies he has been reading have shut out his light and that only a better relationship with reality can heal him.
I can’t recall the precise moment at which Peter Pan entered our lives. But Peter Pan is like that: he slips in through the window at night when everyone is asleep. Peter Pan is so light that he can—as J. M. Barrie, the wealthy Scottish writer who first dreamed of Peter Pan, puts it—“sleep in the air without falling, by merely lying on his back and floating.” He is so naughty that he can creep up behind the stars and blow them out. But he became a great friend because he led us to a place that exists somewhere between here and morning called Neverland, a place where a crocodile has swallowed the alarm clock and thus conveniently dealt with the problem of ever having to wake up. It was in Neverland that we met Captain Hook, our first real pirate.
Peter Pan ran away from his parents on the day he was born because he never wanted to become a man; he always has his baby teeth. Barrie seems to have shared something of this: Barrie was always a boy, even to the extent that he seems to have been physically unable to consummate his marriage in 1894 to a beautiful actress, Mary Ansell. They certainly had no children, and the marriage dissolved without much fizz. It seems that the emotional keystone in Barrie’s life was a moment when he approached the bedside of his mother, Margaret, who had taken to her bed for long periods to mourn the death of David, a favorite son who had died at the age of thirteen when he hit his head on the ice in a skating accident. Seeing a figure approach her bed in the gloom, Margaret mistook Barrie for the dead David. “No, it’s not him, it’s just me,” said Barrie. But the cogs in Barrie’s soul locked in that place, and he soon began to imitate the mannerisms of his dead brother. He remained a boy for the rest of his life. It seems he could not allow his mother to lose another boy by becoming a man. How ironic that such sad and strange circumstances led, however indirectly, to the joy of Peter Pan.
As part of my work at school, I was able to accompany a group of thirty-five sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys to World Youth Day in Sydney, in July 2008. World Youth Day, held every so often in a different part of the world, is a huge week-long festival that culminates in a visit from the Pope. In the buildup to the one in Sydney, there were concerns that it could be the smallest World Youth Day ever because maybe only a quarter of a million people might turn up, especially given the impact high fuel prices were having on airfares. I wasn’t worried. A quarter of a million sounded like plenty to me. I don’t much like crowds, and besides, having been a Catholic priest, I have a complex relationship with the church authorities who would be appearing in all their finery. I find it hard to believe that Jesus died naked on the cross so that the rest of us could have a fancy-dress party. I wasn’t looking forward to World Youth Day.
The boys from school rescued me from getting too tangled up inside myself. The Pope seemed like a pleasant old gentleman who was quite capable of enjoying himself. I had started to think more warmly of him from the moment he took the same name as we had given our Benedict; I imagined we must have had more in common than I realized. Every time he spoke in Sydney, I found, despite myself, that I was wholly caught up with the simple depth and elegance of what he said. He named things that were important to me.
Quite apart from that, it soon became obvious that the crowd, which ended up closer to 400,000, was really the best part. While there were dozens of cardinals and bishops way off in the distance, all solemnly dressed up and doing as much as any mardi gras to support the dry cleaners of the world, there were thousands of young people much closer to us. The kids had the time of their lives. Their godly joy was infectious. It budged the cranky heart of their middle-aged teacher.
Of course there were hassles. We traveled by bus, and upon arrival at the school where we were booked to stay, we found that the organizers had thought it would be fun to send us and our bags to two different places. Deprived of my breathing machine, I went downstairs that night and curled up beside the photocopier in the staff room. To my surprise, there were times when I had slept worse in my own bed.
It takes all types to make a religion, and the week before the Pope arrived was a spirited one, culminating in a 6-mile walk across the Sydney Harbour Bridge to Randwick Racecourse, where the Pope would be saying Mass the following morning. The bridge is closed on rare occasions; the time before this was for a walk for reconciliation between indigenous and nonindigenous Australians in 2000. The prospect of getting across it without having to pay the toll was too good to miss. Along the way, I thought of my mother who, as a wide-eyed little girl holding the hand of her mother, had walked across the bridge on the day it was opened in 1932. She had walked across it again for its golden jubilee in 1982. These days, Mum wasn’t walking far.
I rang her from the bridge; she was in bed watching on TV, annoyed that the Pope was a smoker but pleased that he liked cats. I also called Jenny to reminisce about a time before we were married when we had also walked across the bridge on a blustery day and we were the only people crazy enough to do it. She had her hands full looking after six young people at that moment, our own and three cousins. Her present moment was too full to share with the past.
Along the way, onlookers joined the festive atmosphere. A boy wore a T-shirt that read I MAY LIVE IN MY OWN LITTLE WORLD BUT AT LEAST I KNOW EVERYBODY HERE. Workers on a building site made a cross out of iron pipes and hammed it up for the crowds, which were more appreciative of irony than I had imagined they would be. Pilgrims are people looking for signs. Somebody stood on the wayside with a placard reading this is not a sign.
That night, 200,000 people slept in the open air at the racecourse. To be honest, not all of them slept, at least not until well after bedtime. But by the time I got out of my sleeping bag at 5:10 AM to beat the line for the toilets—facilities whose condition reminded us that even spiritual gatherings have their physical dimensions— the whole crowd had settled. I began to walk around the outer track of the course.
Everybody had been given a shiny thermal blanket to sleep under. These looked like large sheets of aluminium foil and were probably more useful for cooking than a serious attempt on Everest. But most people were using them on this crisp, clear night, and at 5:10 AM, the full moon reflected light onto the peaks and troughs of all these shiny blankets as if they were a sea. I kept walking. There were 200,000 people here, but I had the place to myself. The stillness of the sleeping crowd was one of the most serene and beautiful things I had ever seen. The moon played with the shapes made by the thermal blankets. It was a prayer without words. I thought of the same moon shining on hundreds of thousands of refugees sleeping in a camp on the Sudan border and wondered about life’s lottery. I hoped that this sleeping gathering might help to change the odds.
Before long, Jenny rang. She had had a choppy night. There were six young things in the house, three of them homesick and the other three sick of home. We talked until we were ready to laugh about it. We decided that six people can trouble more sleep than 200,000.
As dawn approached on Sunday, August 18, 1851, Honoré de Balzac was dying in his bed. Balzac was larger than life in every sense. He left behind a remarkable legacy, not least the intricate panorama of La Comédie Humaine; a canvas of more than a hundred novels and plays that portray an entire culture: France in the turbulent first half of the 19th century. Balzac’s great comedy is predicated on the same understanding that all comedy is—that, as he said, “nothing is insignificant.” Balzac was so heavily invested in this project that, as he approached death, struggling with considerable pain, he began calling on some of its characters. Victor Hugo, of Les Misérables fame, visited Balzac a matter of hours before he died and later described the scene:
I was in Balzac’s bedroom. A bed stood in the middle of the room. A mahogany bed with supports and straps at either end leading to an apparatus for moving the patient. Monsieur de Balzac lay in the bed, his head propped against a heap of pillows to which red d
amask cushions borrowed from the bedroom sofa had been added. His face was purple, almost black, and turned to the right: he was unshaven; his hair was grey and cropped short, his eyes open and staring. I saw him in profile, and seen thus he resembled the Emperor.
This is a fine tableau from the theater of death. Hugo declares that Europe is about to lose a great spirit: Balzac in extremis even looks like the emperor. The irony of all this lying in state is that Balzac had long believed that bed is the stage on which people look most absurd. He thought that if a couple were serious about preserving their relationship, they should never share a bed. The reason is that, when asleep, most people end up “sticking out their tongues at the passers-by” and resemble the gargoyles of Michelangelo. In his strange and wonderful book The Physiology of Marriage, Balzac writes:
If you knew that one of your rivals had found a way of placing you, in full view of the woman who is dear to you, in a situation in which you must appear sublimely ridiculous: for example, with your face all distorted like that of a mask, or with your eloquent lips dribbling like the copper orifice of some greedy fountain—you would no doubt stab him in the heart. Such a rival is sleep. Is there a man living who knows what he looks like and what he does when he is asleep? We are then living corpses, at the mercy of the unknown power that lays hold of us in spite of ourselves, and manifests itself in the strangest of ways; some men sleep intelligently, others like clowns.
Balzac was no prude. He longed for the days when primitive people had sex in caverns, ravines, and caves, a way of life he missed out on by a mere ten thousand years. He resents the fact that civilization has forced a million people to live “shut up in four square miles” and hence to share conjugal beds, an arrangement that threatened conjugality, writing, “Sleep alone and your love will be sublime; sleep in a twin bedstead and it will be ridiculous.”