Snooze
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Finally, the room is quiet, and I decide that reading the novel can wait. If need be, I can just put a flutter of yellow Post-it notes in it to show that I’m a world expert on the subject and go on the offensive, demanding to know why the students haven’t read it over the holidays.
The Cistercian monk Thomas Merton wrote, “The night, O My Lord, is a time of freedom.”
I remember when I was four and a half myself, trying to find sleep on hot nights. After she turned out the big light, Mum would spray the room with insecticide, which wafted like incense as my brother and I hid beneath the sheets, the last ritual of day. Mum said good night and muttered a blessing for us and a curse on all mosquitoes. When she was gone, I parted my pillow down the middle so my guardian angel could have half. Then I lay still and watched the shadows play over the ceiling until I summoned the courage to ask my angel if we could swap because her side of the bed was cooler. My guardian angel was always a girl, and she always obliged. I fell asleep listening to Mum and Dad say the rosary on the other side of the wall, starting in tired and cranky voices but gradually slowing to a gentle rhythm. Years later, I became superior to this kind of prayer and inwardly scoffed at it, but I have come around in my older age. I can see now that Mum and Dad’s rosary was a kind of lovemaking and that they shared their intimate space with God. My kids have given me a second bite at innocence, and I owe them for that. I gave up on guardian angels as well for a while because I thought I was smart, but then we had three children of our own and I realized how much they need and accept friends of all kinds, angels included. For the freedom to believe without answers, I can thank the nights I have shared with little people and the big Whoever who found me there and reassured me even when I felt hopeless to the task of being a father. Merton says, “You, Who sleep in my breast, are not met with words.”
A room filled with our three sleeping children is such a gift that I can’t move. I mutter again the prayers that have already been answered as, little by little, the noises beyond the room come out of their hiding places. I can hear the fridge humming to itself in the kitchen and the washing machine clunk through another cycle as it deals with the clothes Clare threw out of the peach tree. Outside, a motorbike takes the neighbour off to work and the buses come back to roost in the depot opposite our gate. Gradually, the traffic on the freeway becomes audible and the train line four blocks away also comes back into earshot. Even farther away, noises from the container terminal of the port at the end of our street seep into the room; it sounds like the sugar boat is leaving the dock. We got to know our city better on the day we realized that, most weeks, a shipload of sugar weighs anchor at the bottom of the street next to ours. A horn announces that the town is ready for another sugar hit. There is always something more to know, so I try to stop thinking before thinking robs me of yet another present moment. Finally, I get to hear the noise from farther away than anything. I can hear my heart. It says that it’s home. It says that it wants to sleep.
Fatigue fatigue is when you’re tired of being tired. Jenny and I have it bad. We promise each other an early night because the kids are in bed and it’s been another long day and there are no more phone calls to make. But first there just might be something on television. At 9:00 PM, we find the remote where it has ended up with the dirty plates beside the sink and put the TV on. It’s like sticking something in your arm. An hour later we are still there, too weary to make the effort to go to bed, too tired to sleep, unable to do anything more with the day but unwilling to let it go. There’s a glass from dinner resting beside the screen where the remote usually sleeps. We are hungry for conversation but tiredness has robbed us of any appetite for it. But soon enough we will perform the nightly rituals: emptying the dishwasher, putting out clothes for tomorrow, brushing teeth, checking on the kids.
We lock the doors and the whole world scales down to the size of a house. As we finish in the kitchen and bathroom, the size of our world gradually diminishes again. We go to our room and it shrinks further. We get into bed and it is reduced again, now to a few square meters. We turn off the light and each of us is now reduced to dominion over half a bed. Finally, we surrender. It is an act of faith in the existence of tomorrow. We fall asleep. The moment that happens, the whole world mysteriously expands.
8PM, 1969
Snooze is not a book of clinical expertise. Some books that have practical suggestions about sleep include Lawrence J. Epstein’s The Harvard Medical School Guide to a Good Night’s Sleep; Jessamy Hibberd and Jo Usmar’s This Book Will Make You Sleep; Arianna Huffington’s The Sleep Revolution; and Gerard T. Lombardo’s Sleep to Save Your Life. See also “Where You Live Affects How Much You Sleep, Study of Global Sleep Patterns Shows,” by Inga Ting in The Age, May 15, 2016.
8:48PM, 1876
Thanks to the librarian at the Australian National Library who searched high and low until he found the one letter in that fine establishment written by Edison. Edison would have given him a job on the spot. Other excellent resources include Neil Baldwin’s Edison: Inventing the Century; Mark Essig’s Edison and the Electric Chair; Paul Israel’s Edison: A Life of Invention; and Robert Lomas’s The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century.
9:00PM, 700 BC
A great place to start a voyage with Homer is Adam Nicolson’s The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters. For the best translations, see The Odyssey (tr. Robert Fagles; Penguin, 2004) and The Odyssey (tr. E. V. Rieu; Penguin, 1945).
9:45PM, 1997
Everyone is an expert on sleep science these days, so you can get most of your questions answered by any taxi driver. Otherwise try Jennifer Ackerman’s Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body; Jim Horne’s Sleepfaring: A Journey through the Science of Sleep; Meir H. Kryger’s A Woman’s Guide to Sleep Disorders; Meir H. Kryger, Thomas Roth and William C. Dement’s Principles and Practice of Sleep Medicine; Paul Martin’s Counting Sheep: The Science and Pleasures of Sleep and Dreams; and Carlos H. Schenck’s Sleep: The Mysteries, the Problems, and the Solutions. Of special and poignant interest is Dien Dang, David Cunnington, and John Swieca’s article in the March/April 2011 edition of Clinical Neuropharmacology entitled “The emergence of devastating impulse control disorders during dopamine agonist therapy of restless legs syndrome.”
10:00PM, 1988
Profound thanks to the boss who, in my first year of teaching, interrupted my late night preparations for class and told me simply, “Just remember: you are paid to talk to kids. You can’t do that when you’re tired.” It was advice I never forgot. Other resources for this chapter included Stanley Coren’s Sleep Thieves; Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air; and Hugh Mackay’s The Good Life.
10:30PM, 1980
William Dement is a true pioneer in the field of sleep. His popular work is partly autobiographical. I highly recomend Dement and Christopher Vaughan’s The Promise of Sleep: A Pioneer in Sleep Medicine Explores the Vital Connection Between Health, Happiness and a Good Night’s Sleep. For those interested in more on William Blake, I recommend Peter Ackroyd’s indespensible biography entitled Blake.
11:00PM, 2005
Thanks to Malcolm Ramsay, my veterinarian friend, for conversations about sleep and animals. For an account of sleeping livestock, see A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past. For avian sleep, see Jennifer Ackerman’s The Genius of Birds.
11:20PM, 28BC
There is great fun to be had with Charlotte Higgins’s Latin Love Lessons: Put a Little Ovid in Your Life. You’ll work a bit harder for your fun but will be well rewarded by Mary Beard’s Laughter in Ancient Rome. The translations I consulted here include The Aeneid (tr. Robert Fagles; Penguin, 2007); The Aeneid (tr. David West); and H. Rushton Fairclough’s Virgil in Two Volumes.
11:59PM, 350BC
For my work here, I consulted mainly Aristotle’s On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath (tr. W. S. Hett); René Descartes’s Discourse on Method and the Meditations (tr. F. E. Sutcliffe); and David Hume’s Principa
l Writings on Religion (ed. J. C. A. Gaskin). Additional resources I suggest to help one become acquainted with the outline of philosophical ideas include Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers; David Edmonds and John Eidinow’s Rousseau’s Dog; Nicholas Fearn’s Zeno and the Tortoise: How to Think Like a Philosopher; Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World; James Garvey and Jeremy Stangroom’s The Story of Philosophy: A History of Western Thought; A. C. Grayling’s Descartes: The Life of René Descartes and its Place in His Times; Christopher Phillips’s Socrates Café: A Fresh Taste of Philosophy. Two overarching collections on general philosophy that are quite good are Porcupines: A Philosophical Anthology (edited by Graham Higgin) and The Philosophers: Introducing Great Western Thinkers (edited by Ted Honderich).
MIDNIGHT, 1999
For additional reading on the subject of time, see David Ewing Duncan’s The Calendar; A. Roger Ekirch’s At Day’s Close: Night in Times Past; and Alexander Waugh’s Time. For information related to the topic of Arabian Nights, I used in particular Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, edited by N. J. Dawood, and Malcolm Lyons’ The Arabian Nights: Tales of 1001 Nights (tr. Ursula Lyons).
12:02AM, 1915 etc.
Of the many excellent sources on the topic of grief, C. S. Lewis—who wrote that “grief is like a bomber circling around and dropping its bombs”—has one of the best in his 1966 book A Grief Observed. Other sources related to Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkein include Humphrey Carpenter’s J. R. R. Tolkien: A Biography; Colin Duriez’s J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis: The Story of a Friendship; and Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski’s The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings. Sources for research on fairytales included Bruno Bettleheim’s The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales and Maria Tatar’s The Annotated Brothers Grimm. For my work on brain science and the relationship between war, PTSD and sleep, I consulted Norman Doidge’s The Brain that Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science; Kevin Gournay’s Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder: Recovery After Accident and Disaster; Ray Parkin’s Into the Smother; James Prascevic’s Returned Soldier: My Battles—Timor, Iraq, Afghanistan, Depression, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; Oliver Sacks’s Hallucinations; Pattie Wright’s Ray Parkin’s Odyssey; and an excellent article by Nicole Hasham in the August 22, 2016 issue of The Age entitled “‘Compliant, groggy state:’ In Nauru’s Ghost Camps, Refugees Sleep Away the Pain.”
1:50AM, 2000
Useful sources regarding Shakespeare include Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare and James Shapiro’s 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare. Some of the information in this chapter about beds and nighttime customs came from Eileen Harris’s Going to Bed; Greg Jenner’s A Million Years in a Day; and Lawrence Wright’s Warm and Snug: The History of the Bed.
2:00AM, 1856
George Pickering’s Creative Malady is over forty years old, but it is hard to beat for its understanding of illness as a lifestyle accessory. Also recommended is G. K. Chesteron’s “On Lying in Bed” (from Eight Essayists, edited by A. S. Cairncross). Sources for information related to the life and times of Florence Nightingale included Mark Bostridge’s Florence Nightingale; Gillian Gill’s Nightingales: The Extraordinary Upbringing and Curious Life of Miss Florence Nightingale; Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians; Cecil Woodham-Smith’s Florence Nightingale; and Florence Nightingale’s own Notes on Nursing.
2:10AM, 1728
In addition to my trusty old editions of Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe—both well-thumbed paperbacks with broken orange-colored spines from the Penguin English Library published in the 1970s—I also consulted for this chapter Leo Damrosch’s Jonathan Swift: His Life and His World; Jonathan Swift: A Modest Proposal and Other Writings (ed. Carole Fabricant); Swift: Gullivers Travels and Selected Writings (ed. John Hayward); Jonathan Sacks’s Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence; and Peter Steele’s Jonathan Swift: Preacher and Jester. The editions of the Qu’ran referred to in this chapter and elsewhere are The Qu’ran: A New Translation by Tarif Khalidi, put out by Viking Books in 2008, and 1974’s The Koran, translated by N. J. Dawood.
2:15AM, 2007
For more on Freud, see Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (tr. A. A. Brill) and Anthony Storr’s Freud: A Very Short Introduction. Other resources for this chapter include two books by Karen Armstrong: Islam: A Short History and Muhammad: A Prophet for Our Time.
2:35AM, 2007
A 1999 work by Rosanna Vic put out by the Narcolepsy and Overwhelming Daytime Sleep Society of Australia entitled “Sleep Too Much or Too Little? What is your problem? NODSS Guide to Sleep Disorders” proved to be very helpful here. Also invaluable were Experiences at the Edge of Consciousness, edited by Anna Faherty, and Margueritte Jones Utley’s Narcolepsy: A Funny Disorder That’s No Laughing Matter.
3:15AM, 2014
My favorite translation of The Iliad, Robert Fagles’s work, which has a fantastic introduction by Bernard Knox, was used here. Also referenced are Desmond and Mpho Tutu’s important The Book of Forgiving: The Fourfold Path for Healing Ourselves and Our World and Desmond Tutu’s No Future Without Forgiveness.
3:30AM, 1860
For work on famous sleepers and wakers throughout history, I consulted Eluned Summers-Bremner, Insomnia: A Cultural History. Additional information came from A Benjamin Franklin Reader (edited by Nathan G. Goodman) and Margaret Thatcher’s The Downing Street Years. Dickens himself was a great help in understanding his sleep patterns, as seen in his Selected Journalism (ed. David Pascoe) and Sketches by Boz (put out by London’s Mandarin Publishing in 1991). Also useful were Peter Ackroyd’s Dickens: Private Life and Public Passions; Jane Smiley’s Charles Dickens: A Life; and Claire Tomalin’s Charles Dickens: A Life; as well as John Cosnett’s “Charles Dickens and Sleep Disorders” in The Dickensian (ed. Malcolm Andrews; Winter, 1997).
4:30AM, 2007
My favorite translation of Don Quixote is the 2005 Vintage Books edition translated by Edith Grossman. See also William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World and Ilan Stavans’s Quixote: The Novel and the World. For my work on Peter Pan, I consulted mainly Andrew Birkin’s J. M. Barrie and the Lost Boys and Lisa Chaney’s Hide-and-Seek with Angels: A Life of J. M. Barrie.
6:00AM, 1851
For my work on Balzac, in addition to Balzac’s own The Physiology of Marriage, I consulted Andre Maurois’s Prometheus: The Life of Balzac and Graham Robb’s Balzac: A Biography. Also referenced: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator of Steele and Addison, edited by Angus Ross. A few worthwhile resources on the topic of caffeine and coffee: Bonnie K. Bealer and Bennett Alan Weinberg’s The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World’s Most Popular Drug; Andrew Brown-May’s Espresso: Melbourne Coffee Stories; and Anthony Wild’s Coffee: A Dark History.
THIRTEEN O’CLOCK, 1984
Orwell had as many blind spots as anyone, but his famous 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” is still a brilliant description of an exhausted culture, one in which tired people can only mouth clichés. Other sources for this chapter include Josef Pieper’s Lesiure: The Basis of Culture and Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays.
BEDTIME, 2008
Merton entered my life in a time of loneliness and taught me the meaning of solitude. For that I owe him more than thanks. Essential references on the topic of silence include Diarmuid MacCulloch’s Silence: A Christian History; Thomas Merton’s “Fire Watch, July 4, 1952” in The Sign of Jonas; and Henry David Thoreau’s “Night and Moonlight” (The Oxford Book of Essays, edited by John Gross).
Special thanks to Iris Blasi, Fran Bryson, Nikki Christer, Lucy Costas, Michael Costigan, the Costigan family, Tony Flynn, Hugh Flynn, Clare Forster, Alisa Garrison, Jenny Gleeson, Ted Guinane, Jude Hallam, Michael Heyward, Martin Kelly, Daniel Lazar, Judith Lukin-Amundsen, Rod Morrison, Sabrina Plomita
llo-González, Libby Roughhead, Stephen Russell, Coralie Scott, Peter Steele, Chris Straford, John Swieca, David Winter, Christopher Worsnop, Arnold Zable and the four wonderful people who are the stuff my dreams are made of: Jenny, Benedict, Jacob, and Clare.
SNOOZE
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Copyright © 2017 by Michael McGirr
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition June 2017
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