From Essays After Montaigne
Reason doth appoint us ever to walke in one path, but not alwaies to keepe one pace: and that a wise man should not permit humane passions to stray from the right carrier; he may (without prejudice unto his dutie) also leave it unto them either to hasten or to slow his pace, and not place himselfe in an immoveable and impassive Colossus. Were vertue herselfe corporeall and incarnate, I think her pulse would beat and worke stronger, marching to an assault, than going to dinner: For it is necessarie that she heat and move herselfe. I have therefore markt it as a rare thing to see great personages sometimes, even in their weightiest enterprises and most important affaires, hold themselves so resolutely-assured in their states that they doe not so much as breake their sleep for them.
The story of my emotional health can also be told as the story of my sleep. When I was about eleven, as the then undivided chaos of anxiety and depression that had been evolving over the previous few years in the unstructured void of my emotional life cam to be, I found sleeping difficult and anticipated the coming of night with a nauseous dread. My mind would not give itself over to repose. The chaos wouldn't resolve itself peacefully back into its void. Instead, it tormented me with visions of infinity and my mortality. I cowered and cried, but I couldn't explain to anyone what was happening or overcome it on my own. Much later, when I began to explore Buddhist meditation, I found that same stubborn chaos unwilling to surrender itself to my mindfulness. When I started to read In Search of Lost Time, I found the extended description of the narrator's struggle to sleep that opens the novel almost comfortingly familiar. For me, reading that novel was a year-long effort to surrender myself to the swelling ocean of prose, thereby floating only in the current moment. The novel was the most complete possible portrayal of what it meant to be, as Proust's English translators have rendered it, "highly strung" and how one might learn to adjust to that condition.
As an adolescent, I learned to ease into sleep by listening first to baseball games on the radio, and later, to music. (My father had gotten me a stereo with a record player that would play a record or two--I could stack them--and then turn itself off.) The sound of the announcer's voice or the songs on the records gave the frantically wandering train of my thought something to follow until physical fatigue overtook it. It was essentially a form of distraction, but it almost always worked, and for years after that, I slept well. There was a period of a few months in my senior year of college when a few friends and I rented a house off-campus, and they subtly persecuted me by keeping me from sleeping. But that brief interlude aside, I was able to sleep peacefully for nearly twenty years. It was only on my ill-fated European bike trip, when I was far from my wife, that the chaos resurfaced, torturing me with the news that being married only increased my vulnerability to mortality and loss. And things got worse from there.
Already bowed by the upheaval in the firmament that had kept the anxiety and depression at bay for so many years, I spent the rest of that summer and all of the following summer subject to all manner of disturbances outside my bedroom windows. During that second fall, when the rest of the Western world was transfixed by the destruction of the World Trade Center just down the road, I reached a couple of personal nadirs. First, I was overjoyed by a bout of appendicitis that required emergency hospitalization, complete with sedation and quiet (though I was later vexed by the Vicodin withdrawal). Then, a few weeks later, I went a full week without sleeping. Beaten and broken, I started on Clonazepam. With that, and therapy twice a week, my sleep began to return to normal. There were a couple of bumps, including depressive episodes and a new awareness of passive suicidal images, that led to a switch from Clonazepam to Celexa, which was a bit more difficult than I would have liked, but has ultimately been effective.
Now, sufficiently medicated and living in a quiet apartment, I'm able to get as much sleep as I want, though there are troubling messages from its void. I'm told that I often twitch violently, and on a handful of occasions over the last several months, I've found self-inflicted scratches on my face in the morning. And the last couple of nights, my dreams have been long, immersive, and disorienting, so that I wake confused and tired. Yet after relating my whole tawdry tale, I'm struck again by the fact that President Bush has been able to sleep peacefully through the destruction of political order, the environment, and our economy. I'm less inclined to see that as an example of one who holds himself resolutely assured in his state (of one who's healthy in a way that I'm not) than as a symptom of psychosis.
7:56:00 AM 
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