Of the physical symptoms in the creeping vanguard of middle age—cracking skin on the feet, declining eyesight—the worst, perhaps, is my complete thralldom to a rigid and quite boring sleep schedule. If I hit the sack later than 10:30 p.m. or rise much after 5:00 a.m., it is unlikely to be a top-rank day; it is unlikely that much worthwhile will happen at all.
My tenuous sanity relies on getting up in silence, making coffee without kibitzing, reading a few pages of something—something on paper—without interruption. (Shortcut to mental illness: Look at your phone first thing upon waking.) To hell with sanity; my livelihood depends on being able to spill thoughts, or at least words, out of my brain. After 7:30 a.m., when my children rise, thoughts and words take flight, leaving behind a sort of high-pitched hum that lasts until 8:00 p.m. By evening, the glittering foam of inspiration has dispersed, and the internal sea of the mind is smooth, beset with an idiotic calm. It is not moralizing when I tell people that by 7:00 a.m. the day is pretty much over. High-level cognition, original thought, the psychic bone-marrow you scrape out of yourself and spread on the page—inaccessible by breakfast.
I realize this is picky and a little precious. I should be more like Raymond Carver, who would bash out a page here, half a page there, while he waited in the car on the school run or his children were fighting. On the other hand, Carver drank himself to death at fifty; for now, I’m going to stick to getting up early. Nevertheless, I still feel a bit defensive about this prissiness. The fact that I have the sense that it requires explanation or justification is itself a sign that something a little unbalanced is afoot here. When my wife reads “King John’s Christmas” to the children—“King John was not a good man; he had his little ways”—I feel an uncomfortable pang of recognition and say to myself, Let’s hear his side of things.
It hasn’t always been this way. When I was young, I was a creature of the night; the serious part of the day would start at dinner, and things wouldn’t get really swinging until 10:00 p.m. or so. For a period of about a week when I lived in India, following a bout of the flu, I became straightforwardly nocturnal. It was the Divali holiday; my roommate was traveling and classes were not in session. I’d rise around sundown at the shy sound of the first experimental firecrackers, wash, dress, and then go out for a walk in the dark, watching the street dogs skitter and whine as the locals really got down to business with the fireworks. In this period, I tried every Western-style fast food restaurant within walking distance of my apartment, wrote about a quarter of a novel draft, and became extremely bugged out. I do not recommend a purely nocturnal schedule.
One of the beauties of being a creature of the night is that you do have long, uninterrupted stretches in which you can take a crack at wasting time in really complex ways. There was, in the physics building at my college, a lecture hall with a theater-grade sound system. In this cavern, named for some late magus of the acoustic sciences, a fellow creature of the night and I once started to watch Solaris, the Soviet answer to 2001, at two in the morning. It’s a two-and-a-quarter hour movie, and it’s catastrophically bad. It is one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. Did we stop after the first hour? No. We just started complaining. I had two problem sets due at noon the next day, but this was really important, really high-level time-wasting.
Sometimes, I would eat fast food at three or four in the morning—really menacing stuff, like the “superburrito,” or, if I was in funds, a hearty cheeseburger-beer-milkshake trio. To me, now, a cheeseburger at 3:00 a.m. sounds like an exotic form of torture and execution, like scaphism or the golden bull. I can’t eat chips after nine.
Occasionally, at least once or twice a semester, usually around term-paper time, I would stay up a full twenty-four hours or longer. (I believe my record was something like forty-two.) Why did I do this? Surely I wasn’t productive for all those hours; even if I had been, the invariable twelve- to seventeen-hour crash that followed must have canceled it out. Youth is a kind of madness.
Perhaps age is, too, but it’s a much gentler one. Parties and the theater are out; the usual course of excitement is limited to a sort of desperate typing as 7:30 approaches. (Will I be able to finish writing before the kids are splashing oatmeal and bellowing “The Wheels on the Bus”? We’ll see.) Daylight savings shifts are for me a disaster, a private rendition of some civilization-ending Bronze-Age cataclysm, like the explosion at Tall el-Hammam or the eruption of Thera. Recovery time: six weeks, sometimes more, rarely less than four.
Bakhtin theorizes that the novel, and the written word more generally, is a way of giving time a shape; it is primarily a way of conditioning a person’s experience of time. The process of writing is, too. As I get older, the shapes and uses of time become more important. The men in my family die early.
It is now 7:30 a.m. The day has begun and this column must end.
