I’m lying in bed reading a short novel by Gianrico Carofiglio on my Kindle. Guido Guerrieri, Carofiglio’s funny, sad, world-weary lawyer from Bari, is standing in the doorway of a woman’s apartment. He holds two bottles of wine and smells dinner within. Since his wife left him, he’s been in a deep funk. His sleep is bad. He’s given to spontaneous bouts of crying. In the interest of getting his life back together, he moves to a new complex and discovers one day this woman, Margherita, who lives two floors above him. Or rather, she discovers him, and invites him to dinner.
During this chat in the doorway, he makes a joke. “Rise,” Guerrieri says. Meaning, in Italian: she laughed. Rise. Sempre con quella specie di gorgoglio.
My Italian is good enough to understand that Guerrieri hears something funny in her laugh. What I don’t get is “gorgoglio.” She laughed, once again with a kind of . . . what?
I touch the word “gorgoglio” on screen. Kindle highlights it and goes to its Italian dictionary, which I decide to bypass. Reading the definition of a word you don’t know in a language that you only sort of know can be dicey. Plus, it’s nighttime. I don’t want to work. I touch “More” in the dialogue box and ask to see the translation in English.
Hubble.
She laughed, once again with a kind of . . . hubble?
I’m not sure what laughter with hubble sounds like. I touch “gorgoglio” again and drag-select the whole sentence; then I click “More,” “Translation.”
She laughed, once again with a kind of gurgle.
Got it.
Guerrieri notes this detail and steps inside. Margherita shuts the door.
While I read, my wife stirs beside me. Her back to me, she is mostly asleep. I hold still, lying on my back, careful not to disturb her.
I’ve been reading on this Kindle in bed for some months now. It’s backlit, which means I can read in the dark. There’s a childish pleasure in that, a throwback to the flashlight under the covers. Except this is different. Two or three times a week I’m likely to wake from deep sleep at 2:00 or 3:00 a.m. In a moment, I’m fully awake. What do you do? Lie there and wait for your thoughts to dissipate and sleep to return? How long do you wait? Pre-Kindle, after twenty or thirty minutes, I would get out of bed and go downstairs, lie on the couch, and read. A couple of pages of The Faerie Queen can be as good as an Ambien. Now I stay in bed. The device weighs seven and a half ounces. If I want to, I can bring the complete works of Spenser and Plato and Shakespeare to bed, without worrying about crushing my chest.
There’s lots of advice these days on how to sleep—how to go to sleep, how to stay asleep. Exercise. Seek bright light during the day and avoid bright light at night to calibrate your circadian rhythms. Don’t take naps. Avoid spicy food and alcohol in the evening. Smart phone, computer, TV: shut them down an hour before you go to bed. Use your bed, the National Sleep Foundation advises, for sex and sleep only.
One day I ask my friend who is a sleep doc, should I be getting more sleep?
“I get, like, four to six hours,” I tell him. “Seven if I’m lucky.”
He turns his head, listening in his doctorly way, and says nothing, which I take as a request for more information.
“Maybe four to five hours uninterrupted. Once in a great while six.”
“How do you feel?” he asks.
“Good,” I say. My biorhythm bombs every day around four o’clock in the afternoon. I tell him that. “Shouldn’t I get eight hours?”
“You feel okay,” he says.
I nod.
“If you feel okay, I’d say you’re probably okay.”
Eight-hour sleep may in fact be a modern convention—and an error. Gregg Jacobs, a sleep disorder specialist at University of Massachusetts Medical School, observes, “For most of evolution we slept a certain way. Waking up during the night is part of normal human physiology.” Historians point to hundreds of references to segmented sleep—first sleep, then second sleep—in medieval literature and medical texts. Back then, it was dark at night, very dark, all night. Nightlife, such as it was, could be dangerous. At sundown, people went to bed, slept soundly, and then woke for an hour or so, for reading, for prayer, for sex, after which they went back to sleep. Then came light and more light. In the 1650s Paris began to light the streets. In the 1690s London did so as well. Nightlife became a thing. Around this time, the word “insomnia” makes it first appearance in the English language.
Then there is electricity and a lot more light.
By the twentieth century, our thinking about sleep has made a dramatic shift. There is sleep resistance. To sleep begins to seem like a waste of time. (I remember saying, as a college student, probably right after reading Jack Kerouac, that I didn’t want to sleep, I wanted to live, I wanted to burn bright, I would sleep when I was dead.) And now there is the new normal: sleep eight hours. In our time, segmented sleep is an aberration. Today, when we wake up in the middle of the night, something is wrong. Sleep needs fixing.
Can it be fixed?
Should it be?
I read a few more minutes. Guerrieri’s dinner with Margherita is fraught, confessional. She opens his wine, pours him a glass. They eat. For a digestivo he drinks brown tequila. Then, smoking Guerrieri’s cigarettes, one after another, which explains her gurgling laugh, Margherita tells him a long tale, of her drinking problem, of her troubled courtship and failed marriage, and now of a period of recovery. Poi restammo li’ a parlare, ancora, fino a notte. “We hung in there. We talked and talked, into the night.”
I close my Kindle, and its light goes out.
I am awake.
Sometimes in the dead of night, you lie awake and there is a riot of thought, a profusion of images, memories. It’s your wild mind coming at you, a mixture of mystery and the mundane. Why am I alive? Will the lawnmower start? Am I a good husband? A good father? Did I forget to thaw the chicken? What is it to die?
Before their second sleep, people once lay awake thinking thoughts like these. It must be normal human psychology. I can’t imagine them thinking, Drat, I wish I could go to sleep. They must have thought, How curious, and sad, and funny, and dreadful. How wonderful to be so wide awake.