Sleep

Most of the people in my life are near or in the Last Quarter or else are related to me. The majority of them have ailments; most of them complain about sleep. When Levinson wrote The Seasons of a Man's Life(1978) and the Seasons of a Woman's Life (1990-something) and when Gail Sheehy, using some of the same data, published Passages, I don't recall sleep being a major issue. Then, again, my memory is another one of those issues I keep hearing discussed. But sleep seems to become more and more elusive. I shouldn't have neen surprised, I suppose: when a friend spent nearly $5,000 on a mattress set; when there are so many ads for hypnotic drugs on the television; or that one company is advertising a bed set for 90 times what I paid for my first new car in 1965 (can a mattress really cost $175,000 US). Levinson and his colleague's research done at Yale in the early 1970's showed that people (men, orginally, were studied) tended to -- by their 40's -- started to count backwards and either recast their earlier vision of life (The Dream) or became melancholic or depressed. He didn't take the easy way out and assume that this was just a matter of "rounding up" after one passes the half way mark in life. But still, Levinson and Sheehy didn't talk much about sleep. As the King in The King and I says: "It's a Puzzlement!" There are notes left over from the Wednesday evening meetings that Sigmund Freud had in his apartment suite in the first decade of the 20th C. There was one fellow who appeared for a short time at these meetings ... Schwerdtner. Sometime in 1907, he, in one evening, asked two questions that stick in my mind ... I mean 'stick' in my mind. Read them years ago. Maybe the expression has to do not just with stickiness in its gooey or adhesive sense, but more like its penetrative sense ... like a pithed frog in the Biology laboratory ... it's stuck to me. The first question had to do with why people tend to have difficulty maintaining opposing feelings towards the same person? Why do we tend to turn ambivalent love into hate? or love? Why can't we accept, as Freud himself was to argue much later in the 1920's, that the opposite of love isn't hate but the opposite of both is apathy. Schwerdtner's second question had to do with why sleep is necessary, at all. Nobody has a good answer for either of his questions, thus asked in Vol I of the Minutes of the Vienna Society and Schwerdtner is gone by the near-end of Vol II. He doesn't even seem to be indexed for Vols III or IV. What was it that Shakespeare or Kohellet said about our brief parade through this life. Ah! but to sleep ... perchance to sleep? on a good night? maybe for more than four hours? I hear (sometimes, I tell not-so-funny) jokes about sleep. My favourite is the guy who defines death as the only "natural" cure for middle age insomnia. Well, actually, it is not an absolute insomnia that the Last Quarter crowd seems to specialize in ... more like odd-somnia. Broken sleep! Watching movies at 3AM, one lady reports, and napping at 3PM. An hour at a time ... "I need to check the clock once an hour to make certain it's still running." ... Big joke? To make certain "it's" still running. When that first baby comes home, we peek into their rooms to make certain their breathing. Our bed-mates wish we would stop that middle-aged snoring long enough for them to get some sleep. "Aye, Matey! Put a cork in it or I will!" Perchance, to sleep!