I have trouble sleeping. I don’t mean that I have trouble getting to sleep. I have trouble getting to bed, doing what I have to do to prepare to give up, go under, put out the light. I have trouble trusting that the world won’t forget me, fly off in its spinning, leave me dumbly unconscious, alone.
Sometimes I stay up just because it’s the best time of the day for me. I write fiction and get lost in it. At one, two, three in the morning, there’s a certain settling, an end of the day sigh. I can concentrate.
In the medieval European village, you had to have your own tallow if you wanted to stay awake (or at least see what you were doing). In the modern global village, the satellite never shuts off. If you want dark and quiet, you have to turn off, tune out, unplug–and the temptation is not to. As Wilse Webb, a pioneer sleep researcher, puts it: most people in industrialized countries go to bed when they want to and get up when they have to. Even children sleep less than they did two generations ago.
The fruit had been forbidden but the couple, entranced, took a bite. They went to sleep and slept all night and all day. Soon they came to regret succumbing to the lure of the snake. The world of sleep was all that he had promised, but they couldn’t leave it or control their dreams. And they couldn’t stay awake.
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“Your descendants will suffer even more. Some will be assigned to night shifts; others will stay up all night fighting wars, engineering inventions, composing symphonies, comforting inconsolable infants, studying for exams, arguing my existence, weeping in loneliness and despair, memorizing dramatic roles, tapping out E-mail messages, and being mesmerized by Vegematic commercials. In the morning and all day long they will be regretful, and they will be doomed the next night to repeat–through the end of time.”
So here we are, winners of a Pyrrhic victory: we have the technology to light up the night, but we don’t have the bodies to live in it. We’re like Prometheus, that old fire stealer, who was punished for taking what belonged to the gods.
A friend who studies psychology says that people’s first memories shift according to their moods. When they’re happy, they recall good memories. When I’m cheerful, I say that this is my earliest memory:
