Awake in the Night Country.
When I was in college I read The Night Country by Loren Eiseley. My professor said it was an important book because of the quality of the writing and the profound observations Eiseley makes about our inner and outer darkness. I was taken with the idea that the author suffered from insomnia, and wrote the book mostly in the middle of the night. “It is thus that one day and the next are welded together, and that one night’s dying becomes tomorrow’s birth. I, who do not sleep, can tell you this.” It was the kind of writing that opens all sorts of possibilities.
Mr. Eiseley’s book came back to me the other night when my appointed hour arrived. That hour is somewhere around two in the morning, when I get my own nightly bout of insomnia. You can’t quite set a clock by it, but for me waking up at two in the morning has become more routine than I’d prefer.
It’s a weird sort of awakening. Definitely not a rise & shine event. Rather, it’s a gradual awareness that I’m no longer asleep. I’m just lying there, eyes shut, brain is stewing over how to fix some odd assemblage of the world’s problems. There are so many problems to stew over these days. But mostly it’s big unanswerable questions that do no one any good to lay awake worrying about.
I wish my nightly vigils could be as productive as Loren Eiseley made his. On one sleepless night he wrote this:
“Man who bumps his head and fumbles in the dark because of his small day-born eyes, fears the ghosts of the dark above all things. Maybe that is the real reason why men string lamps far out into the country lanes and try to run down everything with red eyes that happens to waddle across the road in front of their headlights. It is cruel but revelatory: we are insecure, and this is our warfare with the dark. It began when man first lit a fire at a cave mouth and the eyes he feared — very big eyes they were then — began to blink and draw back. So he lights and lights in a passion for illumination that is insatiable — a poor day-born thing contending against one of the greatest powers in the universe.”
What I mostly do at night is consider the ticking of the clock. I feel it marching toward morning. I fear the havoc my sleep shortage will wreak on the next day. I fear the clock itself, tick-tocking without remorse toward the end of my days. In the nighttime hours it’s hard to escape one’s mortality.
I brought all this up with my son, who’s worked in a sleep lab as part of a fellowship in Pulmonary Medicine. After listening to him talk I think what’s most amazing is the degree to which sleep continues to be a mystery. We know sleep rhythms are regulated by the hormone Melatonin. But we don’t really understand the physical mechanism. What builds up in the body to make you feel sleep deprived, for instance. What I did learn is that your sleep patterns change as you get older. The deeper, more restorative sleep diminishes. I’m reminded that Loren Eiseley did his best writing later in life.
Sleep, when it comes easily, is like a small death. A trust-fall into soft oblivion, with only precedent to assure us that we’ll wake again in the morning. Maybe that’s why I resist it so when I’m lying awake at night contemplating my mortality.
In the second act of his play Macbeth William Shakespeare got sleep exactly right. “Sleep that knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” I’m pretty sure he was laying awake in the middle of some dark Elizabethan night when the famous lines came to him.
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