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.
“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.