Man Ray: Sleeping Woman (1929)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
What can one do, asks Nietzsche, when one succumbs to ennui and feels sick and tired of everything and everyone, including oneself -?
Some recommend drugs; others a stroll in the park. Still others say you should turn to Jesus.
Nietzsche, however, believes the best thing to counteract that awful mixture of boredom, fatigue, and depression is plenty of sleep – both real and metaphorical. Philosophy, a discipline born of idleness, teaches the importance of knowing how to nod off, in either sense, at the right time and in the right way.
Speaking as someone who has regularly compromised their sleep over the years, let me also affirm the vital necessity of a good night’s rest - and, indeed, of daytime naps. Sleep not only sharpens the mind and the senses, as neuroscientists confirm, but it makes happier, healthier, and more creative.
I was once rather disparaging about Tom Hodgkinson (click here), but I agree entirely with him that it’s an absolute certainty that in paradise, everyone naps.
Notes
Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1982), IV. 376.
Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, (Cambridge University Press, 1982), IV. 376.
Tom Hodgkinson, How to be Idle, (Penguin Books, 2005); see in particular the sections on morning lie-ins, afternoon naps, and the joy of finally retiring to bed at the end of each day.
The theme is nowhere more poetically present in Macbeth, where sleep, evil, life/death and in/sanity are envisioned by Shakespeare as fatefully - and for the play's regicidal protagonist, fatally - interwoven.
ReplyDeleteMethought I heard a voice cry, “Sleep no more!
Macbeth does murder sleep” — the innocent sleep,
Sleep that knits up the raveled sleave of care,
The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath,
Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course,
Chief nourisher in life’s feast.
(III.2, 35-40)
What is philosophically stirring here is how sleep is depicted by Shakespeare as a repetition circuit of 'death-in-life', rounding each day with a night that rehearses the desolation and liberation of what we might call, in a Kantian formula, 'Death in itself'. (Death as Bowie's Blackstar: noumenal sublimity, astral collapse, unknowable transcendence of all that lives . . .)
At the same time, in Shakespeare's proto-Freudian vision, this sleep-death is also a 'bath', a 'balm', cleansing and soothing the psychic residues of the day. Sleep is that premonition or repeat prescription of death in which we are baptised into the dream-like death world (which is to say the dream of death) and restored to life, irradiated by darkness. 'Death in itself', irrupting as an unnatural horror into the shadowed light of the sun with the all-too-human murder of Duncan, sunders the intervolvement of the waking and dormant worlds, daylight and dream, by destroying the balance sheet of 'death in life'. The most terrible thing that 'Death in itself' takes away from us, Shakespeare heavily hints, is the nocturnal fantasy of death.
If 'Dying/is an art, like everything else', as Sylvia Plath infamously put it in 'Lady Lazarus', sleep is its canvas and its clay, its screen and its white page. We discourse on dreams and make art for the same reason: to better submit to the infinite muse of our extinction. As Western theatre's exemplary disquisitor on Death, Prince Hamlet, unsettlingly declares:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause.