TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/042991/0429640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.0 KB | 127 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 82

The Best Refuge For Insomniacs


By Lance Morrow


    I know a woman whose son died by drowning on the night of
his high school graduation. She told me she got through the
weeks and months afterward by reading and rereading the works
of Willa Cather. The calm and clarity of Cather's prose
stabilized the woman and helped her through the time.

    We have rafts that we cling to in bad weather --
consolations, little solidarities, numbers we dial, people we
wake up in the middle of the night.

    Somehow it is not much fun to wake up the television set.
The medium is a microwave: it makes reality taste wrong.
Television transforms the world into a bright dust of electrons,
noisy and occasionally toxic. Turn on the set and lingering
dreams float out to mingle with CNN. Dreams are not an
electronic medium.

    During the war in the gulf, the escapist magician made
urgent reality inescapable. Television became spookier than
usual in its metaphysical way: the instant global connection
that is informative and hypnotic and jumpy all at once --
immediate and unreal. The sacramental anchormen dispensed their
unctions and alarms. During the war, I found shelter in books
in the middle of the night. They are cozier. The global
electronic collective, the knife of the news, could wait until
the sun came up. The mind prefers to be private in its sleepless
stretches.

    Read what? I am not talking exactly about reading to
escape. Nor about reading to edify and impress oneself. Paradise
Lost is not much help at 3 in the morning, except of course as
a heavy sleeping potion. I mean the kind of reading one does to
keep sane, to touch other intelligences, to absorb a little
grace. In Vietnam the soldiers said, "He is a man you can walk
down the road with." They meant, a man you can trust when the
road is very dangerous. Every reader knows there are certain
books you can go down the road with.

    Everyone has his or her own list -- each list no doubt is
peculiar, idiosyncratic. The books you keep for the middle of
the night serve a deeply personal purpose, one of companionship.
Your connection with them is a mystery of affinities. Each mind
has its night weather, its topographies. I like certain books
about fly fishing, for example, especially Norman Mac lean's
brilliant A River Runs Through It, which, like fishing itself,
sometimes makes sudden, taut connections to divinity.

    One man rereads the adventures of Sherlock Holmes. He
cherishes their world, the fogs and bobbies, the rational
wrapped in an ambient madness, the inexplicable each time
yielding its secret in a concluding sunburst, a sharp clarity.

    Television news, when it flies in raw and ragged, can be
lacerating. The medium destroys sequence. Reading restores to
the mind a stabilization of linear prose, a bit of the
architecture of thought. First one sentence, then another,
building paragraphs, whole pages, chapters, books, until
eventually something like an attention span returns and perhaps
a steadier regard for cause and effect. War (and television)
shatters. Reading, thought reconstruct. The mind in reading is
active, not passive-depressive.

    There is no point in being too reverent about books. Mein
Kampf was -- is -- a book. Still, some books have the virtue of
being processed through an intelligence. Writers make universes.
To enter that creation gives the reader some intellectual
dignity and a higher sense of his possibilities. The dignity
encourages relief and acceptance. The universe may be the
splendid, twittish neverland of P.G. Wodehouse (escape maybe,
but a steadying one) or Anthony Trollope's order, or Tolkien's.
I know a married couple who got through a tragic time by reading
Dickens to each other every night. Years ago, recovering from
a heart operation, I read Shelby Foote's three-volume history
of the American Civil War -- a universe indeed, the fullest,
most instructive tragedy of American history, all of the New
World's Homer and Shakespeare enacted in four years. People find
the books they need.

    I like writers who have struggled with a dark side and
persevered: Samuel Johnson, for example; his distinction and his
majestic sanity both achieved the hard way. He emerged very
human and funny and with astonishing resources of kindness. I
have been reading Henry James' letters in the middle of the
night. If James' novels are sometimes tiresome, his letters,
which he produced in amazing quantity, are endlessly intelligent
and alive. To a friend named Grace Norton, who was much
afflicted, he wrote, "Remember that every life is a special
problem which is not yours but another's and content yourself
with the terrible algebra of your own . . . We all live
together, and those of us who love and know, live so most." He
told her, "Even if we don't reach the sun, we shall at least
have been up in a balloon."

    Odd that 19th century writers should write a prose that
seems so stabilizing in the late 20th. Ralph Waldo Emerson is
good to have beside the bed between 3 and 6 in the morning. So
is the book of Job. Poetry: Wallace Stevens for his strange
visual clarities, Robert Frost for his sly moral clarities, Walt
Whitman for his spaciousness and energy. Some early Hemingway.
I read the memoirs of Nadezhda Mandelstam (Hope Against Hope;
Hope Abandoned), the widow of Osip Mandelstam, a Soviet poet
destroyed by Stalin. I look at The Wind in the Willows out of
admiration for Mr. Toad and for what he has to teach about folly
and resilience.

    The contemplation of anything intelligent -- it need not
be writing -- helps the mind through the black hours. Mozart,
for example; music like bright ice water, or, say, the memory
of the serene Palladian lines of Jefferson's Monticello. These
things realign the mind and teach it not to be petty. All
honest thought is a form of prayer. I read Samuel Johnson
("Despair is criminal") and go back to sleep.