For example, right now, at 3:30 in the morning on Christmas Eve Eve, I may have woken up after falling asleep at 10:00 last night because I am still jet-lagged after returning from Paris 3 days ago; because I ate a whole acorn squash for dinner; because my stomach is upset (see reason #2); because I drank coffee after dinner; because I have been seeing old friends who live far away all week at an average rate of 1 friend per day, and by now their faces have collected like coins at the bottom of my dreams enriching me, as a fountain in the plaza of a foreign city, with currency I cannot use; or because my partner is moving away next fall to go back to school, and his absence fans out like a light from that future point disrupting any present, momentary darkness with images of what I might do and where I might go. Or is it some combination of these factors -- jet-lag plus nostalgia, say, or squash mixed with anxiety?
Cause and effect also seem to be unstable. Was my sleep interrupted because I'm burping (see reason #3) or am I burping because my sleep was interrupted? In other words, are we alive in order to work and eat and grieve and give or do we give and grieve and eat and work because we're alive, after all, and there isn't much else to do, especially when the weather's bad?
It's hard to say; the alternative would be to not live in the first place and then work or possibly to not live and not work at all, but no one who has taken either of these paths has anything to say about the matter, at least not to us.
There is a simple, if not easy, way of testing some of these hypotheses: I must take two weeks off from work each winter for a total of at least 6 years and each year when I arrive at my parents' house in western Massachusetts, after spending the afternoon walking near Mansfield Lake with Rachel in a scatter of raindrops that thickens to a downpour as we drive from Great Barrington to Housatonic and she points out between the swipe of her windshield wipers the vacant factories that will soon be converted to dance studios and art colonies, I must either eat squash, or drink coffee, or have a partner who is leaving in the fall, etc.
It would take another few years to test each combination of factors, but after a finite, albeit extended, amount of time I would know why exactly I am awake right now, which may or may not help me fall asleep the next night, but still wouldn't answer the question of whether it's worth it, whether a short essay is better or worse than an hour of sleep, whether anyone, including myself, will care for what I have written enough to outweigh the very good chance that I will get much less done tomorrow and in a much worse mood than I might have otherwise.
1 comment:
You're welcome. I'll put a link on my blog, maybe that way, some new people will check your blog out. I don't expect you'll do the same, because indeed my blog is in Flemish (or Dutch, actually; Flemish and Dutch are pretty much the same language. You only notice the difference when it's spoken, pretty much like American English en British English). I doubt anyone will understand.
I assume you are going/went to college. May I ask what discipline you were in? I study Psychology, which means I'm quite aware of the limits of Experimental Science. I have exams in a few days, right now, I'm learning about Somatoform Disorders.
German can be a beautiful language indeed. It's quite related to Dutch actually, especially in my area. We have a lot of dialects here, that are strongly influenced by our neighbouring country, Germany (the new generation - which includes me - is not so familiar with those dialects anymore though.
).
Actually, German is one an official language in Belgium, even though only a small amount of people have it as their native language here. It's a small country, but we have indeed three languages over here: Dutch, French and German.
But enough with the cultural education, I'm gonna get back to my Psychopathology. Keep up the good work!
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