Everybody’s tired. Low-grade exhaustion is like the dull color of our walls and our floors. Ask your friends how they feel: it’s very likely a lot of them will feel beat, worn out, stretched thin. Our relationship with time is a particularly weird kind of scarcity. How many of us feel like we never have enough time, and yet, we must also endure this stretch or endure that task, just to make it to the next milestone? I suspect most people, if prompted, would say that they’re tired—tired of Covid-life, or of the daily onslaught of indignities and demands on our energy—just tired, period.
When I was young, I often had trouble falling asleep. I thought it was normal to lie in bed for at least two to three hours, every night, waiting to recede into unconsciousness. In adulthood, and particularly in my 30s, the problem instead seems to be sleep maintenance insomnia. I’ll wake up at three in the morning and my mind will be racing. Roughly the past decade of my life has been afflicted in this way. It’s certainly not every night; there are good stretches, lasting months. But it was only in my thirties that I started to suffer bouts of depression, too, and I have often linked this affliction to my sleeplessness.
I’ve experimented with various remedies (although I’m not much of a pill-taker). What have I found? Exercise during the day helps a lot. Avoiding caffeine in the PM. A little alcohol may be beneficial; too much definitely hinders the quality of sleep. Regular meditation appears to help, but I’m not very good at being regular with it. Melatonin works, but I take it only rarely, and only when I know I have at least eight hours to devote to sleep—getting up and trying to function sooner than that leaves me very groggy, very fuzzy-headed. A friend recommends jaiogulan tea, which I still haven’t tried. All of these are some tip-of-the-iceberg tools to help one sleep well overnight.
I have also found some ways to deal with the problem by reframing it in my mind. Previously, here, I’ve mentioned that I sometimes handle intrusive nocturnal anxieties by thinking of future-oriented activities. What can I plan, what can I look forward to, what can I do? This helps. Additionally, rather than wallowing in how exhausted and miserable I was going to be the next day, I learned to perform a mental shrug and say, “what’s the worst that will happen tomorrow as a result of this? I’ll feel tired. Big deal.”
Along these lines of reframing, something that got retweeted into my feed piqued my curiosity. I clicked over to Alexey Guzey’s essay about his experiments with sleep. He suggests that people don’t need 8+ hours every night, and that in fact mild sleepiness throughout the day is a totally normal and evolutionarily expected part of human experience, just as is mild hunger. I had also read, before, that sleep deprivation was used to treat depression. While looking at Guzey’s notes I wondered something new: what if my sleep maintenance insomnia, which I’d previously interpreted as a symptom of stress and depression, in fact represented an attempt to combat my depression? What if I was waking up with my mind racing because my mind was trying to cling to purpose, and in so doing provide me with tools to work back to a healthier mental state?
I’m not fully convinced of this, but at the very least, it’s an interesting change in perspective. I’m cautious of some of Guzey’s points, including his metaphorical understanding of wakefulness as life and sleep as death. As I am with a lot of “productivity” literature, I am both drawn to the allure of doing some things better and having more time and space to do them, and allergic to the need to optimize and quantify all things.
It’s said that slumber before industrial civilization (and electric light) often took the form of biphasic sleep. People who would wake up in the middle of the night before their second sleep might write, pray, chat, have sex, whatever. The scholar Hans Blumenberg apparently skipped one night of sleep per week, to stay up and work, at least when he was in hiding during World War II. Balzac (like Fred A. Leuchter, Jr.) famously drank an insane amount of coffee each day. R. Buckminster Fuller experimented with sleeping a total of two hours a day for a few years—all in thirty minute increments. Fuller reported a great deal of energy on this awful-sounding regimen, and he only gave up this pattern because it didn’t fit with the lives of his other colleagues and collaborators. Susan Sontag reportedly got by on four hours a night, if that. One of my professors in grad school would often send emails in the wee hours—1:37am, 2:45am, 5:03am.
Dave Hickey described his life during, I think, part of the ‘80s like this:
“From nine in the evening until three in the morning, I listened to music, popped pills, snorted powders, and read John Ruskin. At 3am, I would start writing and write for about six hours; then I would walk down to the Little Chef for gyros and eggs at the beach.”
For me, the appeal of this scenario resides in the freedom to indulge in the flow state; to be, perhaps, a little manic or obsessed. If I lived alone and had no job or financial needs, I would very possibly have an intensely erratic schedule, and spend many hours or many days at a time involved in “projects.” As it stands, my life is necessarily more regimented and less open to the whims of my energy levels or my interests. So instead I look for ways to adapt and to accommodate.
Toni Morrison would rise before dawn, and before her children, to write—I’ve long been intrigued by the solutions and compromises that people with day jobs and/or caretaking duties reach in order to have their time to work. Discipline, compromise, and, yes, some sacrifice are necessary. I’m not some Silicon Valley guy with a six figure passive income and no commitments, able to blow where I listeth, so to speak. I have mundane obligations and practical limits. I bet this is true for most of you reading this, as well.
At the end of 2021 I read one of the most compelling and enjoyable novels I’ve read in the past few years: Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. This had been on my list to read since, I think, the mid-2000s. Some of you reading this are no doubt familiar with her story and the story of this book’s publication, but for those who aren’t, in a nutshell: The Last Samurai, which has no relation to the Tom Cruise samurai movie of the same name, is about a (brilliant) single mother’s choices in raising her (brilliant) son while holding down a low-paying clerical job in the UK. Linguistics, history, and philosophy provide a lot of the material. The book was a cult hit, but its success also proved kind of a curse, and DeWitt famously had to contend with editors and publishers who were not on the same wavelength as she was. (A little more on that below.) The practical problem of trying to live a life of the mind when time, money, and peace are incredibly scarce and precious appears as both a theme in the novel as well as a persistent topic in DeWitt’s own online existence.
Is Ludo, the son in The Last Samurai, truly a child prodigy, or has he simply been gifted the freedom and patience to learn in a way so many of us have not been able to learn? It’s impossible to say. The book does not treat this as a conventional “nature vs nurture” question but instead lets the issue bubble up as a more speculative motif throughout. In the second half of the book, Ludo, wanting to know his absent father, goes in search of prospective surrogate-fathers. Informed by the example of Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai, which he and his mother watch obsessively, he “tests” each one, in a way, to see how they will react to his appearance.
Sibylla, the mother, has to earn her modest living, plus she has her own voracious personal and intellectual interests, all of which seems to take a backburner to the demands of her son and his insatiable appetite for learning. In this context, the life of the mind is alluring … but almost impossible.
“I thought: Yes, to live the life of the mind is the truest form of happiness. Reading Aristotle was not even then my idea of intellectual felicity, but after all it is possible to lead the life of the mind without reading Aristotle. If I can read anything I wanted I would read The Semantic Tradition from Kant to Carnap.
“This is absolutely not possible today, with L interrupting every two minutes to ask a word.”
The impulse to get down to something intellectual—to work on language or poetry, mathematics or botany—can be a solitary and perhaps solipsistic enterprise. Certainly throughout my own life this has been a conflict. I don’t want to live a life cut off from people, I’m not anti-social at all; but I simply need to have space and leisure in my life for this solitude, because whatever I can contribute to other people is to be drawn from this well. Instead, what I get are only snippets, imitations of deep time, and consequently I fear I’m only ever able to offer the world a shadow of myself.
Everybody’s tired, and everybody’s distracted.
DeWitt is an intriguing case for a literary author because she’s interested in language and linguistics, as well as games (bridge, poker, chess), computer programming, statistics, graphics and data visualization (she rhapsodizes about Edward Tufte, and I might have first heard of Tufte myself through her blog, years ago). She’ll read popular technology books or business books or psychology. She’s not simply a polymath as fodder for literature, subordinate to the sheen of writing, but rather because she’s interested in possibility. She works in a very speculative mode, which is one of the things I like about The Last Samurai but also her public persona as a writer.
She talks in a podcast about seeking out evening jobs so that she could visit the British Library during its daytime hours. (The Internet helps free from this limitation.)
DeWitt describes (in this blog entry) her difficulties as caretaker to her mother, post-surgery, and how she envisioned a writer’s relationship with an agent:
She would share thoughts on means of committing suicide should need arise. So it wasn't simply a matter of providing the occasional care involved in changing the [ostomy] bag, preparing meals, light housekeeping; it was a matter of marshalling the kind of social self that is capable of raising morale.
Proust talks about the fact that the writer's real self is something alien, solitary: the social self is just a shell sent out in the world. One of the reasons you need an agent is that you need someone who actually understands that - someone who is not repelled by having, for the most part, social interactions with a thing that is simply a façade, with occasional exposure to the obsessive-compulsive machine that writes the books. This is something quite different from loving books: loving books is easy. The better the books are, though, the more ruthless the obsessive-compulsive machine behind them, and the more frankly manipulative, in all likelihood, the social self. An editor is, for the most part, someone who engages with texts and knows how to get them published; the specialists who work on a book have their special skills; none of these jobs presuppose the ability to work with someone whose real self just stares at a blank wall laughing out loud and typing madly to get it all down before it's gone. You want an agent so all these people have an actual human being to deal with. The presumption is that the agent is someone who can deal with monsters.
This is not a dodge that works with your family. If you spend 3 months en famille you're cut off from the alien; you can't let your guard down.
As with everything, balance and harmony are virtues. For those of us drawn to creative or intellectual pursuits, however those look, however much or little outside acclaim these pursuits receive, it is likely that we will have to contend with constant competing demands on our time and energy simply because we are not rootless, rich, and ruthless. We have to pay bills or listen to the chatter of small children or drive to stores or scrub sinks or toss and turn overnight. We also have to ensure that we have the kinds of rest, include sleep, that we need that might allow us to do the work of the world and the work of the mind.
023 Parry the Blow
Whatever the circumstances (and I share most or all of your feelings here about exhaustion and time), happy to see you are still finding the time to write and post these essays for others to read. I thoroughly enjoy them.