The philosophy of non-sleep
Vladimir Nabokov wrote that the world’s population divides into two categories: those who sleep peacefully at night, and those who sleep badly. He himself was a notorious insomniac: he was afraid of the night, which he called a ‘giant’.
E. M. Cioran, the Romanian desperado who became a distinguished French writer, was of the same opinion. ‘Human beings,’ he wrote in History and Utopia, ‘are divided into sleepers and wakers, two specimens of being forever distinct from the other, with nothing but their physical aspect in common.’ This, he thought, was enough to account for a person’s ‘extravagances’, although what he had in mind was surely his own writing style. In 1982, he wrote: ‘It’s not so overwhelmingly bad to have suffered from insomnia in youth, because it opens your eyes. It’s an extremely painful experience, a catastrophe. But it makes you understand things which other people can’t: insomnia puts you outside the living, outside humanity. You’re excluded. […] What is insomnia? At eight o’clock in the morning you’re exactly where you were at eight in the evening! There’s no progress. There’s only this immense night around you. And life is only possible through the discontinuity which sleep gives it. The disappearance of sleep creates a sort of dreary continuity.’
Cioran is clearly an ungrateful descendant of the two little children in Adalbert Stifter’s famous Christmas story Rock Crystal who err in a snow-storm on their way home to their alpine village in the next valley and end up on a glacier shelf. These ‘tiny moving dots among the formidable masses’ seek shelter in a bedrock cave. Safe at least from the world-obliterating blizzard outside, they dare not close their eyes for fear of freezing and becoming part of the stone and ice around them. They sit in the emptiness of the hours to come as well as in the surrounding immensity. It is not just the black coffee extract they drink that saves them from the sleep ‘whose seductiveness invariably gets the better of reason’: something of the grandeur of Nature itself wakens in them a resistance and wakefulness strong enough to withstand its most hostile forces. The brother and sister in Stifter’s story have each other for company; Cioran had only himself. (Or so he liked to pretend: his companion Simone Boué provided for his bodily needs for the decades in which he was reputed not to have slept, and even edited his notebooks, but doesn’t appear once in his voluminous writings.)
Cioran wasn’t suffering from simple sleep loss. He had forfeited the right to sleep, possibly because he knew too intimately the chaos of history and his own role in it. His insomnia was a double privation. In the several interviews he gave late in life he often referred to the boyhood experience of having to leave his native village of Răşinari for the considerably larger city of Sibiu (also known, like everywhere else in that part of the world, by another two names: as Nagyszeben and Hermannstadt). The Transylvanian capital was then a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and for centuries had been considered one of the outposts of Europe. Little Emil cried, inconsolably, all the way to town.
Cioran’s sleeplessness in the dead time was a stylised form of the apprehensiveness expressed by another writer adopted by the French—the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He had an oceanic phrase for it: ‘insomnia in the bed of being’.
‘A kind of closing of the eyes’
Writers, it might be thought, are typical wakers: their imaginative life is always at a tangent to ordinary social life, and not only for economic reasons. Literature is often a pursuit in the counterglow: only night offers the quietness in which a person can school himself to work in the absence of those who have long since turned in.
Franz Kafka complained much about sleeplessness as he wrote into the small hours. He felt like a sentry on cosmic guard duty at the boundary of consciousness, a soldier on the Great Wall between belief and unbelief, fearful he might lose his life should he fall asleep. Guarding his appended body was what he was there to do, to neutralise all threats to it and secure its workings. Yet with so much effort being given over to staying awake in order to keep watch over his organs, sleep was bound to seem enticing. ‘There is, in Kafka,’ observed Elias Canetti, ‘a sort of sleep-worship; he regards sleep as a panacea.’
In fact Kafka, as even his most admiring critics concede, could be nearly autistic in his detachment from social reality. Kafka’s attention to language neglected the etymology of the word: to be attentive (from the Latin verb attendere) means to stretch out towards, to bend to another person’s presence. Writing is a solitary activity; insomnia had broken the tacit social contract with the family. Avoiding sleep offered him a sense of hyperarousal: that was when he felt most able to write. Hyperarousal was insomnia’s vertigo. ‘Only in this way can writing be done’, he told his diary in September 1913, having spent all eight hours of the night writing his first successful story The Judgement, his legs so stiff in the morning he could hardly dislodge them from beneath the table. He had been making literature out of an unclaimed portion of universal sleep.
Yet chronic sleep deprivation has its dangers, as Kafka well knew—as well as posing problems for a man who was a civil servant and factory owner in his daytime hours. ‘There are moments at the office while talking or dictating’, he told his correspondent Grete Bloch in 1914, ‘when I am more truly asleep than when I sleep.’
Although he wasn’t past taking a tablet or two of Benzedrine to help him meet the deadline on a commissioned piece, W. H. Auden was no night-owl, and even distrusted writing that smelled of the candle—what his classical model Horace might have called ‘lucubrationes’. Auden wrote in Hic et Ille, ‘if you really wish to destroy a person […] the surest method is not physical torture, in the strict sense, but simply to keep him awake, i.e., in an existential relation to life without intermission.’ Seeing in the dark is one thing; seeing the dark another. Try to dispense with sleep several nights in a row and you are likely to end up institutionalised, and in an appalling state of psychotic dispersion.
Auden was an avid reader of Scientific American: he would have read about the sleep deprivation experiments of the 1950s, the findings of which were avidly adopted by intelligence services as a way of obtaining cooperative detainees. Sleep deprivation was a torture method. Nowadays we seem to be happy to do the torturing by ourselves, on ourselves. Doctors report a vast increase in restlessness, irritability and inability to cope at work, school or with others, not least in children. These cases of transient insomnia aren’t army-sanctioned experiments in existential tension; they’re the result of people spending too much time interfacing with their gadgets. We’ve gone into voluntary self-detention. In fact, only a very few people have a genuinely low need for sleep (and still feel rested during the day): they mostly end up as politicians, captains of industry and chefs. The rest of us become sleep debtors.
Friedrich Nietzsche, a sensitive diviner of new cultural trends, thought there was something pathological about the nineteenth-century’s obsession with the past. He likened it to a kind of insomnia. Sleep is a desirable state; it allows humans not so much to repose as to forget. In his eyes the great reading public, so eager to recuperate its own history, was about to have a collective breakdown through lack of sleep—a lack of sleep so comprehensive, at any rate, as to induce forgetfulness. He had one or two experiences of going without sleep himself, until his mind gave out. Nietzsche couldn’t have anticipated that Sigmund Freud, who owed so much to his writings, was about to extend civilisational memory all the way back to the clay tablets of Uruk, in Mesopotamia: Freud was to become one of the great modern dream-readers. It was perhaps only there—after anamnestic descent to the Land of the Great Rivers—that memory could truly go to sleep. James Joyce, too, associated the Tower of Babel with sleep, perhaps in consideration of that great line from The Epic of Gilgamesh, written in cuneiform before almost anything else in history but first read with new eyes just over a century ago: ‘Sleep, which spills over people, overcame him.’
Gilgamesh’s epic might be over four thousand years old but it was our great-grandparents who read it with true discernment. Rainer Maria Rilke was one of the first writers to appreciate its originality after it was deciphered at the end of the nineteenth century: in 1916 he wrote, ‘Gilgamesh is stupendous! I [...] consider it to be among the greatest things that can happen to a person.’ Elias Canetti was even more fulsome: the story of Gilgamesh had a crucial impact on his intimate life ‘such as nothing else in the world’.
Narcolepsy and wakefulness
Sleep, insomnia, oneiric states: they were all in the air of the early twentieth century. Nicolas Vaschede, a professional physiologist, confirmed in 1914 that sleep isn’t just the absence of being awake, but an active biological process. All animals seem to do it; some standing erect (horses), others on the wing (migrating birds). Herbivores sleep less than carnivores, having much to fear from the stealth of the latter. Sleep certainly has its natural archaeology, but it took until the 1950s for scientists to understand fully its dynamic, oscillating nature, and the importance of what is called rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, especially in infant life. Even then biology may well be inflected by cultural practices: people in traditional societies (who go to bed when the light fades) often get up in the middle of the night to engage for a while in social activities, and our immediate ancestors often rose to pray for an hour or two before reclining again on the pillow. The odd thing is: we don’t understand why we sleep. William Dement, the American scientist who mapped sleep architecture in more detail than almost anyone else, wrote at the end of his career that ‘the only reason we need to sleep that is really, really solid, is that we get sleepy’—and that is less a reason than a precondition.
Sleep begets sleep. Or rather, going to sleep is a strange ritual in which the body pretends to be sleeping in order for the mind to become dormant.
Vaschede’s contemporary, that amateur literary scientist Marcel Proust, assures us in his contemporaneous giant work of extended physiology À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, that sleep is ‘the most potent of hypnotics’. No kidding! The opening pages of his famous work are certainly contagious; for years I could never advance further into his novel because, reading it in bed, I found the overture, which describes his character Swann talking about his sleep experiences, sent me into the thing itself. And once you’re in it, the labyrinth of sleep ignores the law of time: Swann’s attempt to wake up ‘consisted above all in an attempt to introduce the obscure, undefined block of sleep that [he] had just been living into the framework of time.’ Somehow, the living daylights resume. Never have those hypnopompic moments of wakening ‘behind a vestment of oblivion’ (as the frontal lobe returns us to the world in the first few minutes of awakening) been more lyrically evoked: Proust has a fantastic word for the illusion of hearing bells in his dreams: he calls them ‘aeroliths’. (There have been times when I thought I was hearing the bells of Combray too, but their peal always turned out to be the chime of my old-fashioned alarm clock.)
Proust was unfamiliar with rural Ireland though. Flann O’Brien made much of his country’s soporific culture and populated his novels with narcoleptic characters ready at a moment’s notice to fall asleep, even in public. His savant hero De Selby in The Third Policeman muses to himself that sleep is ‘an immeasurable boon’, not least on account of his own habit of nodding off opportunely. ‘Several times I had gone asleep when my brain could no longer bear the situation it was faced with.’ If only it were that easy! His assumption suggests a country where the characters are neither quite alive nor quite dead, although the phenomenon known as a microsleep, in which the mind momentarily disengages with the waking world, is by no means uncommon or restricted to Ireland.
It is true that a degree of disengagement or even a state of torpor may be necessary to assimilate some experiences. Walter Benjamin, in his famous essay on storytelling, suggested that the repose of a sleeping person finds an analogy in boredom, ‘the apogee of mental relaxation’, which he thought was becoming an ever less common feature of modern life. In this state of self-forgetful reverie, we are receptive in depth. ‘Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience’, he suggested in his famous essay The Storyteller. ‘A rustling in the leaves drives it away.’
Flann O’Brien’s sleep-blanketed Ireland could never know the existential pangs of Cioran’s world. Yet a kind of tonelessness adheres to them both. Une nuit blanche—the French term for a sleepless night—is the most exquisite torture, according to Cioran. ‘You emerge in fragments, stupid, absent-minded, without recollections or forebodings, and without even knowing who you are. And it’s then that the day appears useless, the light pernicious, and even more oppressive than the dark.’ (Cioran eventually developed Alzheimer’s disease, and there is some evidence to suggest that sleep deprivation may be implicated in its onset.)
The physiologists, professional and amateur, are right: we have an intrinsic biological drive to sleep. Sleep benefits mind and body, and consolidates memories. It might be seductive to have the freedom to work, eat or travel as and when we want, but our bodies have another agenda: under the coordination of a part of the brain called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the organs of the body actually follow slightly different physiological rhythms. There are even special light receptors in the eye that are uniquely responsive to the blue light of dusk and serve to recalibrate our circadian system: visually blind people are still able to respond to the wax and wane of the cosmos. It is only those who lack ocular bulbs—for whatever reason—who are truly blind.
Subjugating the night, in the manner recommended by so many writers—existential heroes in their own version of the Grimms’ story about the boy who set out to discover fear—might seem a victory for culture over biology, but biology is far older than the lights of civilisation, and it is surely an illusion to imagine that we can gain a fuller life by remastering the internal order we share with other living creatures. Nonetheless, the search is on. A recent article announcing the search for a ‘cure’ for sleep comments: ‘Just as the birth control pill uncoupled sex from reproduction, designer stimulants seems poised to remove us yet further from the archaic requirements of the animal kingdom.’ Whether they know it or not, wakers who celebrate ‘enhancement’ (or ‘150% life’) are also cheerleaders for the absolute rule and consumptive tyranny of a 24/7 society.
Sleep is the charity of being alive, much in the same way as forgetting allows us to reconstitute things—even at the risk of repeating ourselves in the most dim-witted, imprudent, injudicious ways. Sleep is where readers are to be found, among aeroliths and sundogs and lucid floaters. There is kind of expansiveness in being a sleeper too. Homer knew that: in his epic poems sleep is a sacred gift. ‘For mortals cannot go forever sleepless’, Penelope tells the returning Odysseus.
Being permanently awake under modern artificial light might just be a way of withdrawing from the complexity of human life, not least its ethical complexity. Sleep ought to foreshorten time, and restore us, refreshed and purified, to the clarity of a new day. Proust’s thesis was that for most of our lives we are asleep to our own true natures, and only waken in the instant we recognise ourselves for what we are. Then, for the length of a lightning flash, our being grasps ‘what it normally never apprehends, namely, a fragment of time in its pure state.’
Ethics in the dark
Insomnia in the bed of being: the phrase is a distant reverberation of the first flare of consciousness in the Land of the Two Rivers, some five thousand years ago. As another ancient dream-book has it, the world began with the interruption of a sleep. So what on earth has happened to us, given that most of our working days culminate in a few weary hours staring at indiscreet images on what James Joyce, always alive to the significance of new inventions, called ‘the bairdboard bombardment screen’? Surely it is better to say, with the Italian writer Erri de Luca, who gets up each morning at 5 o’clock in order to study the Scriptures in the original Hebrew: ‘These pages are not the fruit of insomnia, but of awakenings.’ That is the rejuvenating first sentence of his novel First Light. He discovered the Bible while working as a jobber on building sites in Paris in the 1980s, and even now, long after he has abandoned hard manual work, still reads it, not as a believer or even a mystic without God, but as somebody who can’t get over his surprise every morning at being alive. The only proof of existence is wakefulness. But that doesn’t mean reality comes to us spontaneously.
In the Mesopotamian epic, Gilgamesh doesn’t want sleep to pour over him. His panic-stricken encounter with death is what the Czech philosopher Jan Patočka called a ‘shaking’: he moves from the vegetative life of prehistory into the unpredictable and problematic. He becomes conscious, and consciousness is like the sky: it is no sheltering vault. Yet consciousness isn’t his final self-hood. Gilgamesh is shaken again when his friend Enkidu dies. Fearful of dying himself, he goes on a quest to find Utnapishtim (‘the Faraway’) and his wife, the only humans to have been granted immortality by the gods after having first (like the biblical Noah) survived the Great Flood. Reaching the island at the end of the world where they live, Gilgamesh discovers that if he wishes to be immortal, he must show he is suited to it: he must stay awake for six days and seven nights.
In spite of all his precautions, he falls asleep. Being immortal clearly isn’t worth the candle: nobody wants to experience eternity as a dreary, endless continuity. When he wakens again, Gilgamesh is aghast at his failure to withstand the test. But on his disconsolate return to Uruk, the city he built, he discovers that he is going to enjoy a form of immortality—only it’s not going to be the kind he was expecting: he will be remembered as the first civic hero. He is the first builder of city walls, as well of those more abstract partitions that mark out historical eras, political jurisdictions and even the frontiers of finite human lives.
Emmanuel Levinas’ philosophy gives priority to the existence of others, their mere presence in the world making demands upon us that are prior to the constitution of the self. Ethics trumps metaphysics. ‘It’s strange to think’, says Eluned Summers-Bremner, author of Insomnia: A Cultural History, ‘that we might most truthfully enact our belonging to the human community by the act of falling into unconsciousness, the place in which we imagine others to be blissfully dwelling.’
If you find that notion hard to accept then you’re almost certainly doing time as an insomniac. Alone, under a cone of light, in the dark.