To sleep, perchance to wander
Every morning, I awake with every intention of starting the day early and accomplishing everything on my to-do list and more, which inevitably brings to mind a character in Heinrich Böll’s short story who barks, “Action will be taken!” into the phone all day. The thought of leaping out of bed and springing into action at, say, 6 a.m. makes me even more reluctant to abandon the cozy confines of my duvet. Unless, of course, there is serious money to be made, echoing the ’90s supermodels Linda Evangelista and Christy Turlington’s infamous declaration: “We don’t get up for less than $10,000 a day.” (I assure you, my rates are much lower.)
The truth is, I love luxuriating in bed. I read, I listen to podcasts, I watch movies on my laptop, I have a cup of tea, and I work. Unfortunately, I have terrible work-from-home habits, as my desk of choice is my lap, and my office chair is four pillows set against the headboard. Ergonomically, it’s a disaster. When I actually need to buckle down, however, and produce something (like now, as deadline looms), I drag myself to my real desk; when panic strikes, I park myself downstairs and work on the dining table with all sorts of books and papers spread out. It’s a miracle, really, that I got all 12,000 words of my dissertation done when I did, several extensions later.
I suppose it’s no surprise that with my bed being the center of procrastination, sleep—the proper recommended daily allowance of eight-hours—eludes me most nights, at least not until after midnight. Partly because I tend to read till late, or catch an episode of a series, and then another and another; partly because my daughters and close friends live in different time zones and my late night is their just-got-off- work moment, perfect for catch-up chats and calls.
When all else fails—melatonin, hot cocoa, brown noise, or the sound of rain on repeat on Spotify—I turn to poetry. Actually, I turn to poetry for everything. I once lent a friend who was reeling from a devastating break-up my book of Edna St Vincent Millay’s poems. Look, I told her, for the sonnet that begins, Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly / In my own way, and with my full consent, thinking that Millay’s tremulous but dignified farewell to a shattered romance would bring her some consolation. After all, it ends like this:
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish, and men do,
I shall have only good to say of you.
Another friend thought it was an incredibly stupid thing to do. “Who’s the idiot who gave her that book of poems?” he thundered, for of course, he was male. Nevertheless, my broken-hearted friend carried that book like a talisman for weeks, bursting into tears every time she read the sonnet.
But back to sleep. My old reliable for nights when insomnia threatens to keep me up till the birds start chirping to herald the sunrise is TS Eliot’s The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock. It’s a gorgeous poem, one of my favorites, in fact, and once voted England’s favorite, too. I listen to the version recited by Anthony Hopkins, whose beautifully modulated voice lulls me to sleep, and happily so. But more than the voice, it’s the rhythm of the poem, the words flowing into each other and washing over me in waves that swell and ebb. It really is quite wondrous, the nocturnal journeys that this particular poem takes me to. “Let us go then, you and I,” it begins, “when the evening is spread out against the sky…” and I am transformed into Pavlov’s dog, primed for magical slumber through half-deserted streets and yellow fog and rooms where the women come and go / Talking of Michaelangelo. The drooling is optional.
