“We tire of distraction or concentration. we sleep and are glad to sleep”
From “Choruses from the Rock”, T S Eliot: In our rhythm of earthly life we tire of light. We are glad when the day ends, when the play ends; and…
Tag: sleep in literature
Versions of Alcman’s “Sleep”
At First Known When Lost, Stephen Pentz collects some versions of fragmentary lines by the Spartan lyric poem Alcman. This fragment was used by Edgar Allan Poe for the epigraph…
“Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts.”
Sleeping, as we all know, is the most secret of our acts. We devote a third of our lives to it, and yet do not understand it. For some, it…
Marilyn McEntyre on sleeplessness and the night vigil
I drift off happily at bedtime, but now wake between three and four in the morning. I like to wake early, but not quite that early. At that hour, I’m…
Sleep and dreams
One of my interests is sleep. Some of this is personal; I used to think I was a “bad sleeper”, until I discovered that thinking you are a bad sleeper makes…
From “Rituals” by Cees Nooteboom
“I sleep very little,” said Philip Taads. He was sitting in the same place as yesterday and wore a plain blue kimono. “Sleeping is senseless. A peculiar form of absence…
From “The Mighty Dead: Why Homer Matters” by Adam Nicolson
So uncatchable is Odysseus that when the poem describes his state of mind, you can never be certain where to find him. When he is lying in bed, anxious and…
Heraclitus on sleep: from “The Poetry of Thought”, George Steiner
Grammatical construction can make of an apparent riddle or paradox a font of expanding intuition: “Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep.” Ring-structures spiral…
Séamus Sweeney 