Just to relax, his poor tired limbs on a restful bed.
Just to relax, his aching heart on a restful bed.
For his head, above all, to be still. It goes on far too long, that head of his. And he calls it work when his head goes on like that.
And his thoughts, no, for what he calls his thoughts.
For his ideas to be still and no longer shake about in his head like seeds in a pumpkin.
Like a rattle made from an empty pumpkin.
When one sees what they are, the things he calls his ideas.
Poor creature. I do not like, God says, the man who doesn’t sleep.
The kind who burns in his bed from anxiety and fever. I am in favour, God says, of people examining their conscience, every evening.
It is a good exercise.
But then, you mustn’t torture yourself to the point of losing your sleep.
At that hour the day is done and well done; there is no doing it over again.
There is no going back on it.
Those sins which trouble you so much, my boy, well, it was very simple.
My friend, you ought not to have committed them.
At the time when you could still not commit them.
At present, it is over, go, sleep, to-morrow you will not begin them again.
But the man who goes to bed making plans for the morrow,
Is the one I do not like, God says.
The fool, does he even know what to-morrow will be like?
Does he even know what the weather will be?
He would do better to say his prayers.
It’s not just that a countercultural embrace of sleep bears witness to values higher than “the cares of this world, the deceitfulness of riches, and the desire for other things.” A night of good sleep—a week, or month, or year of good sleep—also testifies to the basic Christian story of Creation. We are creatures, with bodies that are finite and contingent. For much of Western history, the poets celebrated sleep as a welcome memento mori, a reminder that one day we will die: hence Keats’s ode to the “sweet embalmer” sleep, and Donne’s observation, “Natural men have conceived a twofold use of sleep; that it is a refreshing of the body in this life; that it is a preparing of the soul for the next.” Is it any surprise that in a society where we try to deny our mortality in countless ways, we also deny our need to sleep?The unarguable demands that our bodies make for sleep are a good reminder that we are mere creatures, not the Creator. For it is God and God alone who “neither slumbers nor sleeps.” Of course, the Creator has slept, another startling reminder of the radical humility he embraced in becoming incarnate. He took on a body that, like ours, was finite and contingent and needed sleep. To push ourselves to go without sleep is, in some sense, to deny our embodiment, to deny our fragile incarnations—and perhaps to deny the magnanimous poverty and self-emptying that went into his Incarnation.
Published last year, Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep begins with the effect of digital culture on our sense of time. A world that is always “on”—the irony of “sleep” mode is that it avoids turning off a device—entices or requires humans to be the same. Gradually, we comply: we get less and less rest every night, we rise to check phones or tablets in the wee hours, we pretend work is leisure as we run the hamster wheel of social-media clicks. For Crary, a professor of art history, the life of digital timelessness manifests the most basic and inexorable drive of capitalism, which would shrink whatever is not producing or consuming. Sleep occupies that vanishing margin. Sleep does not want to be productive. “Sleep,” Crary writes, “poses the idea of a human need and interval of time that cannot be colonized and harnessed to a massive engine of profitability.”Crary’s book therefore looks back seriously to a premodern vision of the quotidian, based on repetitive cycles of rest and rising—those spirals that Scheherazade wove into art. But this is not reactionary. Crary wants to reset our clocks, not turn them back. His most valuable insight is that the sheer fact of sleep can be a deliberate choice—a political choice. It could be a mode of resistance.
[gallery] erikkwakkel:
CharmingThis papyrus sheet contains two love charms. While over 1400 years old, the charms are, well, charming. The top part of the sheet instructs the user how to get a good singing voice - and who wouldn’t want that? Certain words had to be written in a chalice, which apparently worked miracles to the voice. The second charm is more in line with what we would expect a person activating a charm to pursue: a woman’s heart. Again words needed to be written down, this time on a sheet of tin, after which the writing had to be buried at the woman’s door. Such charms were deemed powerful; powerful enough to have them written down on expensive material, possibly by a third - professional - party. I can’t help thinking of this pair as plan A and B: if the singing failed, a potent alternative was to secure the desired woman’s heart. Success guaranteed.
Pic: New Haven, Beinecke Library, Call Number P.CtYBR inv. 1791 (Coptic, Egypt, 6th or 7th century): source of the image and more information. Here is another papyrus love charm.
