Night Walks: A Bedside Companion

Contents

Joyce Carol Oates : Preface
Charles Dickens : Night Walks
W.S. Merwin : At Night
John R. Reed : City Cemetary
John R. Reed : Reflections on Jack the Ripper
Richard Wilbur : Walking to Sleep
Hortense Calisher : The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street
Robert Penn Warren : Better Than Counting Sheep
Robert Burton : from The Anatomy of Melancholy
John Hollander : IDEA: Old Mazda lamp, 50-100-150 W.
John Updike : Vibration
John Updike : Tossing and Turning
Brock Brower : Storm Still
Robert Phillips : Middle Age: A Nocturne
Randall Jarrell : A Quilt-Pattern
Ralph Waldo Emerson : Demonology
Emily Dickinson : "The first Day's Night. . ."
Emily Dickinson : "We grow accustomed to the Dark. . ."
William Goyen : Bridge of Music, River of Sand
Maxine Kumin : Insomnia
Maxine Kumin : A Hundred Nights
Mary Oliver : Last Days
Mary Oliver : Bats
Mary Oliver : The Night Traveler
Ned Rorem : Being Alone
Thomas Dekker : On Sleep
Walt Whitman : The Sleepers
Walt Whitman : A Clear Midnight
Frederick Morgan : Death Mother
Carols Fuentes : The Doll Queen
Yannis Ritsos : Suddenly
Yannis Ritsos : Circus
Yannis Ritsos : Insomnia
Wallace Stevens : Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
Henry David Thoreau : Solitude
Robert Bly : Six Winter Privacy Poems
Lewis Carroll : Pillow Problems
Gottfried Keller : Meret
Elizabeth Bishop : Insomnia
Michael Goldman : You Too
Joyce Carol Oates : Lamb of Abyssalia
Ted Hughes : Ghost-Crabs
C.G. Jung : Dreams
Charles Wright : 12 Lines at Midnight
Julia Randall : Insomnia
Paul Bowles : The Eye
Sir Thomas Wyatt : They Flee from Me
Weldon Kees : Girl at Midnight
Julia Mishkin : Insomnia
Jean Rhys : My Day
Sir Thomas Browne : from Religio Medici
Josephine Jacobsen : On the Island
Dana Gioia : Insomnia
Howard Moss : Going to Sleep in the Country
Albert Goldbarth : In Pain
D.H. Lawrence : Shadows
D.H. Lawrence : The Ship of Death

Reviews

• Publishers Weekly, September 24, 1982, p. 61
• Library Journal, November 15, 1982, p. 2178
• Booklist, December 15, 1982, p. 549

Preface

There is a nocturnal personality, a nocturnal spirit, distinct from that of daylight and available only in solitude: hence the secret pride of the insomniac who, for all his anguish, for all his very real discomfort, knows himself set apart from others—if only as a consequence of his addiction to sleepless nights. Some of us are naturally—temperamentally and psychologically—inclined to insomnia (my own intermittent bouts began at approximately the age of fourteen); some of us experience random, but no less amazing, insomniac flights. Unable to sleep, one suddenly grasps the profound meaning of being awake: a revelation that shades subtly into horror, or into instruction. Sartre imagines Hell as a region in which one's eyelids have vanished—perpetual consciousness. Yet this wakefulness is also a region of profound revelations, of images that seem to pierce the very soul—as the testimonies of the men and women collected in this volume suggest. We experience Night but are also Night.

This collection of fiction, poetry, and essays, originally dreamt into being for the "comfort" of the chronic insomniac, has evolved into a more spacious and generous assemblage. Only the exigencies of space prevented my including any number of other works, including excerpts from novels, for it turns out that there is a remarkably vast literature relevant to this theme. (Then again, what is not relevant? The very phenomenon of literature itself—the intimate sharing of consciousness by way of print—seems to require solitude, a kind of "nocturnal" concentration.) The absence, too, of certain familiar and "obvious" choices (Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher," Macbeth's elegiac rhapsodizing on sleep) is deliberate.

Though emphasis has been placed upon imaginative literature, Night Walks contains a number of pieces that address themselves directly to the phenomena of sleeplessness, the nocturnal "self," and the perennially fascinating experience of dreams. Emerson's little-known essay on "Demonology" ("dreams, omens, coincidences, luck, sortilege, magic, and other experiences which shun rather than court inquiry") is a provocative as anything he ever wrote; Jung's meditative thoughts on dreams are unfailingly perceptive; Robert Burton's melancholic excesses of language and speculation constitute a triumph of the serio-comic style. The volume as a whole has been arranged with an eye, or an ear, for certain subtle modulations of theme, vision, texture, voice: it seemed necessary for me to begin with Dickens and his "night fancies," and to end with those extraordinary late poems of the dying D. H. Lawrence. Though Night Walks has been assembled like a loose, lyric prose-poem of a novel, in which divers voices both harmonize and contend, it can, like any anthology, be read at random--for its preoccupations are, as Whitman says, those themes "thou lovest best": Night, Sleep, Death, and the Stars.

I am particularly indebted to Robert Phillips and Raymond J. Smith for their excellent advice regarding the selection of many of these titles.