Insomnia Read online

  It didn’t last. Sacks recounts how this excess of living, this “too-muchness,” soon overwhelmed Leonard L. It tipped him over the edge. The grace turned to mania, thence to messianic delusion. After forty years spent sleeping, this is understandable.

  I am genuinely moved by Leonard L.’s mania and self-inflation, by a surpassing joie de vivre that is admirable, if not in fact enviable. Who, after all, hasn’t hankered after a little too-muchness? It is his crashing, domino-like cascade into diminishment that floors me. First his inner and outer thoughts became increasingly libidinal. Leonard L. would wake hollering from erotic dreams, while by day his yearnings tormented him. He was full of lewd talk, groped the nurses, and masturbated freely. He developed a number of tics, initially around the eyes, but soon there appeared “grimaces, cluckings and lightning-quick scratchings.” He grew overly familiar and overly loquacious, then urgent, compulsive, obsessional. Six weeks into his treatment, Leonard L. wrote a 50,000-word autobiography—“typing ceaselessly,” high as a kite. Yet within a month Sacks found him in state of suicidal depression, besieged by thoughts of torture, death, and castration. When suddenly it all came to a stop Leonard L. reverted to his original motionless state. Thereafter he scarcely spoke.

  Later, during a rare moment when he was able to summon words, Leonard L. told Sacks that levodopa was the devil’s drug. Given the choice he would side with the dark.

  When von Economo dissected the brains of people who had perished from sleeping sickness back in the 1920s he found that most of them exhibited damage in the hypothalamus region of the brain stem. He conjectured that the hypothalamus acted as a kind of neural sleep-control center. Then as now, if you stimulate the hypothalamus you can make people fall asleep.

  If sleep science could probe the brain of Sleeping Beauty—surely a sleeping sickness victim before the fact, snoozing for a hundred years, dead to the world—what might it find? Would her hypothalamus be enlarged, the result of being forced into endocrine overdrive? And what sort of brain-wave function would Beauty display when hooked up to electrodes? On the hunt for some mysterious “sleep substance” or sleep-inducing hypnotoxin, our imaginary sleep scientists might detect culpable levels of adenosine or serotonin, or growth-hormone-releasing hormone—all shown to cause drowsiness—to say nothing of that pop-medical panacea, melatonin.

  But perhaps I am running ahead of myself, given that the organ that was sleeping in the fair princess was not her brain but her heart.

  Buscot Park, in Oxfordshire, lies eighty-five miles northwest of London. Dominated by a handsome gray-stone manor house set on a rise amid sweeping Italianate gardens, the estate, belonging to Lord Faringdon, is now partly in the care of the National Trust. Here, in an eclectic saloon too ornate for my tastes (Empire furniture, Murano chandelier, gilt-edged wall panels), hangs a series of four monumental paintings that narrate the story of “Little Briar Rose.” They are the work—arguably the life work, since their subject preoccupied him for close on forty years—of the Late Pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones. When first exhibited in London, in 1890, at Agnew & Sons in Bond Street then at Toynbee Hall, the paintings caused a sensation. Visitors mesmerized by their luminous color, rich with forest greens, royal reds, and lapis blue, fell to gasping. Spellbound by seductive compositional lines that arc across the panels in languorous arabesques and lead the eye on through twisting briars and the folding drapes of the council room arras to the curtained bower where the princess slumbers, they swooned. The actress Ellen Terry was, for her part, reduced to tears.

  Another visitor, claiming to have been “transported” by the paintings, reported that he would never forget the crowds of “well-dressed women” who sat in silence in front of the panels, “so immoveable that it would have been easy to fancy that they had all been pricked by the fatal fairy spindle, and were all sleeping beauties themselves.”

  Ah, that fatal spindle. I know it well. It has lived in my memories of childhood for as long as I can remember. My father was a couturier (which qualifies him as a wizard of sorts, a magician of appearances), and although there were no fairy spindles at home on which to prick my finger, there were plenty of pins lying around, buried in the weave of the carpet, left over from endless evenings spent hemming and tucking. An innocent hazard, you might think, for a child running around barefoot. Yet each time I stepped on a pin, and there were many times, I feared setting loose some malicious spirit as I watched, transfixed, the tiny red sphere of virgin blood ooze from my pricked heel.

  What if I told you that I came to Buscot Park to dispel just that sort of dream, one that clouds my vision and makes it gauzy, overlaying my actual feelings about Briar Rose with afterthoughts as obscuring as cataracts?

  Nudged on by insomnia, I had somehow persuaded myself that beauty in repose represents something aspirational—a barely attainable ideal maybe, or quality of perfection, I don’t know. But, here, now, I had no intention of being transported out of place and time to some frozen fairy-tale limbo, like those well-dressed Victorian women who swooned. I wanted to wake myself up. Standing before Burne-Jones’s handmaidens dozing beside the well, or slumped asleep over the idle loom (whose “restless shuttle lieth still”), I fought the paintings’ supine allure. And I failed entirely to connect to the passive princess, transfigured by sleep, no longer a person but a gift—or conduit, or key, something, at any rate, transactional.

  Glad to be jogged out of my revisionist reveries, I remembered that the princess who had captured my heart as a child was insomniac—utterly incapable of sleeping even when perched atop of tower of mattresses. Her restlessness was ostensibly the outward manifestation of her possessing a sensibility so refined that she could feel a single pea trapped beneath the bottom mattress. But I knew better. I knew that this princess was just another ordinary, bad-tempered little girl. In my experience, it is generous-minded but not uncommon to see refinement where in fact there is only neurosis.

  Besides, real sleep is not perfect in its stillness. Bodies are not impeccable in repose. If you were to secure a camera to the ceiling above your bed and let it roll, the following day you would be able to treat yourself to a nighttime’s choreography of rolling and unrolling, flipping, grunting, coughing, jerking, kicking, snoring, snorting, masturbating, and dreaming. In sleep we are neither beautiful nor restful.

  A vein of memory opened up at Buscot Park, of tantrums and sulks, connivings and deceits, for I could not abide sleep when I was small. Genuinely terrified of the blank negation it imposed, I would exert myself to come up with fresh ways to dodge the bedtime curfew—every evening a different excuse. At lights-out, a minor rebellion. At six, I knew that sleep was a cursed thing sent to bring the curtain down on the material pleasures of my world—on play, adventuring, company, and the fizzing, bubble-forming activity of thought itself. It was my nemesis (as surely as torchlight was a friend). Squirming in my narrow bed, consumed with fiery refusal, I determined that I would not submit myself to sleep—or, as I saw it then, to disappearing. If sleep wanted to claim me, it would jolly well have to snatch me.

  When Burne-Jones painted his Briar Rose cycle, grown women who had too much to say and to do were being forcibly put to bed. They were diagnosed as hysterics, depressives, and neurasthenics, whose delicate nerves were no match for their mental gymnastics, and given a prescription of hard-core rest. Many of these women were insomniac. Some had eating disorders; others were suicidal. To a woman (almost) they balked at the societal restrictions that corralled them into being mothers and homemakers and disallowed anything else. Nervous conditions, sleeplessness, self-starvation (that is, disappearing before you are made to disappear), this was their protest.

  Another epiphany. As a child I understood very well that Beauty’s cursed sleep was wrought by ugliness’s jealousy. By ugliness being excluded from the charmed circle. At the time I could not have known why I found this so troubling. But life without ugly is a flat and monotone thing not worth having. It is every bit as vapid as
enchanted sleep.

  Zzz and I have lately been facing down a good deal of ugly. Friends dying unexpectedly and before their time, elderly relatives stricken and compromised by age and illness, the ructions and traumas of family upheavals that have forced upon us an elasticity we didn’t know we possessed. It has brought us closer. Taught us how pointless it is to set up defenses against the pain of just living.

  For better and for worse, for richer and for poorer. These are the matrimonial vows that Zzz and I never wanted to make—another version of accepting both the beautiful and the ugly. We thought it was enough to make a marriage bed and to root ourselves in it.

  There was, as you would expect, an actual physical bed, the one Zzz bought to welcome me over the threshold of his solitariness. Proudly, he told me that it came with a Sealy mattress, which alone had set him back six hundred dollars (a princely sum all those years ago). The bed ate up half the available floor space in the tiny one-room studio that Zzz had rented in Palo Alto, after moving on from a marriage that had failed to thrive. I slept soundly in that bed, but Zzz did not. Until then we had conducted our relationship in episodic bursts, enjoying intense but circumscribed weeks of connection, with one or the other of us flying across the Atlantic every few months to dive into the other’s world. Now, along with a large shipment of books and paintings, two suitcases full of clothing, and sundry other belongings—my trusty clock, a beat-up (I thought of it as “seasoned”) coffee machine, a few favorite throws—that I had uprooted so as to make myself feel more at home, I was there to stay. The order of things had been overturned and Zzz wasn’t entirely sure the new configuration suited him.

  What do I remember about those early weeks in Palo Alto? Not much, if truth be told, since within a month we had moved again, into a roomier apartment in San Francisco. I remember how funny I thought it was that as you came into the small downtown area, jammed with restaurants catering to Palo Alto’s affluent populace, you would be enveloped by an aromatic cloud of warm vented air, mellow with garlic and herbs. And I remember walking those same streets when Zzz was at work, feeling lonelier than I had ever felt. I would dip in and out of boutique shops, craftsy and overpriced, most of them, and make small talk with the staff, trying on a transatlantic twang and experimenting with the idea of belonging.

  A better, more visceral memory is of sliding into a red-leatherette-lined booth at the old-fashioned creamery—Zzz opposite me, smiling, spoon at the ready. The place offered twin thrills, both time travel and fakery. The plastic seat covering stuck to my thighs, my skin peeling off it with a squeak, and the waitresses wore updos from which coy ringlets tumbled, and white frilled aprons, like they’d stepped out of a 1950s sitcom. Zzz would order the knickerbocker glory, or at least its American equivalent, an ice-cream boat of such grandiose proportions it would arrive laden with multiple scoops of dairy ice, whole bananas, crenellated whipped-cream caterpillars that ran all over the show, and a confetti throw of sprinkles and popping candy. Diving in with my spoon to work one end of the confection as Zzz worked the other, I ate like a champ. I ate for England.

  Palto Alto boasts a famous Art Deco movie palace, saved from closure by one of the founders of Hewlett-Packard (I forget which), and it really, truly had a man rising up from the pit beneath the screen playing a Wurlitzer organ to the accompaniment of flashing lights, and grinning madly over his shoulder as he scanned the openmouthed faces of the bewildered audience behind him. It was like the bizarre wedding serenade Zzz and I never had.

  Twenty years on, as part of a bid to wake up to each other anew, Zzz and I have adopted a new bedroom—a home from home in the Balearic Islands. It is part of a (badly) converted grain store that sits above the original olive press belonging to a centuries-old rural finca, and it is full of heavy dark-wood furniture. There is a linen chest worthy of a bridal trousseau and a weighty bed that looks as though it ought to be curtained, instead of lying bare under the solid wood beams that hold up the ceiling. This is a bedroom for all seasons. However, it is especially resonant when our upstairs neighbor uses her sink, because whenever she does so it rains in the closet. The first time this happened Zzz’s mono hearing sounded a panicked alarm. But once we caught on to the anomaly, we began to open the closet door whenever it “rained,” then climb back into bed to view the spectacle. The indoor rain was a pitter-patter metaphor for containing the pain of just living.

  The writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman described how at Silas Weir Mitchell’s Philadelphia clinic, in the spring of 1887, she was “put to bed and kept there.” Mitchell was the physician who devised the infamous rest cure, after working with soldiers who had emerged from the Civil War afflicted with “wounded nerves.” When he later applied his treatment to women who complained of nervous disorders, he embellished his strict regimen of bed rest, combining it with massage, electrotherapy, and fat-filled diets. During the first ten days undergoing his cure, Mitchell insisted that his women patients were fed on milk alone, like babies.

  This is Mitchell itemizing the cardinal points of the rest cure: “I do not permit the patient to sit up, or to sew or write or read, or to use the hands in any active way except to clean the teeth . . . I arrange to have the bowels and water passed while lying down, and the patient is lifted on to a lounger for an hour in the morning and again at bedtime, and then lifted back again into the newly-made bed.” And this is Perkins Gilman writing in her diary on the eve of her admission to Mitchell’s clinic: “I am very sick with nervous prostration, and I think with some brain disease as well. No one can ever know what I have suffered in these last five years. Pain pain pain, till my mind has given way.” The difference in his use of language and hers is heart-stopping. It bespeaks of worlds violently colliding.

  As you might guess, the rest cure did little to relieve Charlotte’s suffering, save remove her temporarily from an unhappy marriage and the nagging feeling of having failed as a mother. It gave her a safe space, which even she briefly acknowledged to be a respite. Rest was no bad thing, she conceded, if it served as a spur to further activity.

  But no sooner was Charlotte discharged and sent home than her symptoms redoubled. Years later she would write in her autobiography that the rest cure had caused her almost to lose her mind. She didn’t. But for purposes of what she termed “pure propaganda” (and of a distinctly feminist flavor), she decided that the neurasthenic woman at the center of her short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” should lose hers.

  Gilman’s unnamed fictional heroine undergoes a harrowing rest cure of her own, in which she is beset by florid hallucinations that play across the hideous wallpaper—all “bulbous eyes” and suicidal swirls: “like a broken neck”—of the attic room where she has been put to bed. As these swirling shapes coalesce in her mind she sees patterns slowly emerge, of bars, and then behind these bars she spies a ghostly woman creeping, stopping every so often to shake her cage. Unable to free herself, the phantasm keeps on with her creeping until eventually the rest-cure patient joins her. Having scratched off most of the wallpaper, she falls to crawling around and around the room, seeking escape. She is on her knees. The rest cure has brought her low.

  In his will William Shakespeare left his wife, Anne Hathaway, his “second best bed.” We don’t know for sure who got the best one (possibly his daughter Susanna). Nor do we know much about the bedrock of Shakespeare’s marriage.

  Feminist scholars squabble over the meaning of this bequest. There are those who feel chagrined on Anne’s behalf and insist that the second-best bed he left to his wife implies his second-rate regard. They may be right, since historically the marriage bed was the most important of chattels, and often it was the most valuable item of furniture a couple owned. Then again, perhaps these scholars are just bogged down by literalism.

  The marriage bed represents infinite trust. This is something Penelope grasped at her very core. It is why, when crushed by doubt, suspicious that the man returned to Ithaca after twenty years (cunningly disguised) might not after
all be her husband, she decides to test him. She orders her maidservant to pull Odysseus’s bed onto the terrace, the better to make him comfortable for the night, even as she knows that the bed cannot be moved because it has been partially carved from a living olive tree (by Odysseus himself) that is rooted in the very foundations of the house. Still, she makes sure he is within earshot as she issues her command. She wants him to feel his jeopardy, to understand that moving the bed would entail killing the tree and, by implication, their marriage. Moving the bed would bring their house down!

  Instantly the power dynamic between the couple is reversed, for while Penelope’s hesitation over Odysseus’s identity might belie her lack of faith, this business with the bed effectively transfers the burden of proof to his shoulders. It is no longer Penelope’s loyalty that is on trial (judged by whether or not she knows him), but his own (tested by whether or not, having well and truly strayed, he knows his marriage bed when he sees it).

  In the eyes of some classical scholars, this trial by bed only ramps up the case for Penelope’s wiliness. But Penelope’s mind is confused—“She wept for her own husband, who was right next to her,” as Emily Wilson’s new translation of the Odyssey has it. And since she cannot think, she acts. The way I see it, the possibility that Penelope might finally have been granted the very thing she has longed for nonstop, for two whole decades, is so overwhelming that misgivings surge through her like a stress hormone, overriding hope.