The Books: At Large and At Small, “Night Owl”, by Anne Fadiman

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Next up on the essays shelf:

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, by Anne Fadiman

Anne Fadiman is an “owl” and her husband is a “lark”, meaning: she prefers to stay up all night and go to bed around dawn, while he goes to bed early and rises early. Both are writers. Her writing prime-time is the middle of the night when she senses that the majority of people around her (she lived in Manhattan at the time) are sleeping. (While it’s true that Manhattan “never sleeps”, if you are up and about at 3 a.m., you are seeing/experiencing an entirely different city than the one you experience at noonday.) Fadiman’s essay is about those who are “night owls”, either because of restlessness/insomnia or because they just prefer the Night. There are many categories of owls. Unfortunately, the Larks dominate the moral universe, and tend to judge the night owls. It is seen as better, culturally, to sleep at night and rise early. If you do it the opposite, you are an outlaw. Sleeping until 11 a.m. is seen as lazy (even if you went to bed at 4 or 5 a.m.) So Fadiman is basically writing a ringing defense of the Night Owls. But what happens when an owl is married to a lark? When the heck will they see each other?

Sleep has been on my mind for this entire year. I have had to completely re-wire my sleep patterns, doctor’s orders. I am now in a groove with it but it was tough going at the beginning. Sleep feels automatic. People say stuff like “I”m not a morning person” or “I’m a night owl”, and it seems engraved in stone. Sometimes it is. There have been some very interesting sleep studies done recently, one in particular about how our “8 hours a night” thing is a fairly recent phenomenon, due to the rise of industry and office hours. But before that, people would rise with the sun and go to sleep with the failing of the light. And there was a common thing called “second sleep”. (I read every single comment on that article. Great stuff.) Going to bed at a reasonable hour, waking up in the “wee sma’s”, 2 or 3 a.m., doing a couple hours work/reading/hanging out/devotions/whatever, and then going back to “second sleep”. Fascinating and compelling. For years I was “not a morning person”. Mornings were horrific, I always felt dragged out of sleep and resented the start of the day. This goes back to adolescence. In my 30s, as I started writing more, I needed to change that dynamic and I can now safely say that I am TOTALLY a morning person. Early early morning, if possible. It’s when I get my work done. Those quiet hours before anyone is up are crucial to my mental well-being (maybe too crucial), and also calming. I wake up and I know I have a good three hours before I have to get up and go anywhere. Now there are all kinds of pitfalls with this kind of schedule, and I can be extremely rigid in my adherence to it, which also brings problems. Untangling all of that has been part of my work this year. I now go to bed a good four hours earlier than I have for basically my whole adult life. So I am waking up at the same time, but the bedtime has changed. I was never a “night owl”, not in the way Fadiman describes. I could never get any work done at night, any serious writing, or even planning for writing. I was tapped out, fried. That is slowly changing too, as I am getting stronger from sleeping more hours every night. But still: Morning is my Prime Time. And that’s okay.

Fadiman, naturally, in trying to build her case for the Night Owls, scours literature for testimony. There’s a lot out there. Of course there is Fitzgerald’s famous essay about insomnia, Sleeping and Waking. It’s funny reading my notes to that Fitzgerald essay. I wrote that early this year, before everything changed.

In this excerpt, Fadiman talks about the mental games some people set themselves when faced with insomnia, akin to counting sheep.

At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays, “Night Owl”, by Anne Fadiman

My husband inherited his larkishness, along with his Roman nose and his shaggy eyebrows, from his father, who would feel he had committed an act of irreparable sloth if he slept past 4:30 a.m. I inherited my owlishness from a father who shares Jimmy Walker’s conviction that it is a sin to go to bed on the same day you get up. Even if he retires at 2:00 a.m., my father cannot fall asleep without at least an hour of rigorous mental games. He is the sort of person who could never get drowsy counting sheep; he once told me that he just got wider and wider awake as the numbers mounted, since he had to make sure he was counting correctly.) He composes puns, limericks, clerihews, palindromes, anagrams, and alphabetical lists of various kinds. An example of the last of these genres: Excluding the refractory x, which was long ago thrown out of the game, proceed through the alphabet from a to z, finding words that end with the letters el. Proper names are allowed. Solution: Abel, babel, channel, diesel, Edel, Fidel, Godel … and so on. The sailing was reasonably clear until my father got to z, a perennial troublemaker. It took an hour, from 4:00 a.m. to 5:00 a.m., to come up with the name of a fellow reviewer at The Nation whom he had last seen sixty years earlier: Morton Dauwen Zabel. My father says that at the moment Mr. Zabel sidled into his consciousness, he was suffused with a sense of transcendent completion greater than he had ever felt on signing a book contract or closing a deal.

Insomnia need not be disagreeable. When Annie Proulx can’t sleep, she puts on Quebec reels and dances around for half an hour in her bunny slippers. Until the fantasy wore thin with repetition, F. Scott Fitzgerald quarterbacked the Princeton team to hundreds of nocturnal victories over Yale. Lewis Carroll, like my father, posed himself problems:

Q. If 70 per cent [of a group of pensioners] have lost an eye, 75 per cent an ear, 80 per cent an arm, 85 per cent a leg; what percentage, at least, must have lost all four?

A. Ten. Adding the wounds together, we get 70 + 75 + 80 + 85 = 310, among 100 men; which gives 3 to each, and 4 to 10 men. Therefore the least percentage is 10.

Not everyone’s cup of somnifacient tea – but, as Carroll put it, “I believe that an hour of calculation is much better for me than half-an-hour of worry.”

I feel certain that Morton Dauwen Zabel would never have paid my father an extrasensory visit during the day, nor would Lewis Carroll have performed his amputations with such accuracy had he been operating when the rest of the world was awake. Owls think better at night. It is true, however, that many people make mistakes when they stay up late. The Exxon Valdez ran aground at 12:04 a.m.; the pesticide tank at Bhopal ruptured at 12:40 a.m.; the Chernobyl reactor exploded at 1:25 a.m.; the reactor at Three Mile Island spewed radiation at 3:53 a.m. These accidents were all attributable to human error. But surely the errant humans were among the non-owl 90 percent: day folk, maybe even dyed-in-the-wool larks, who had been forced by the exigencies of shift work to disobey the ticking of their circadian clocks. At Three Mile Island, the workers had just rotated to the night shift that very day and must have been as groggy as a planeful of New Yorkers disembarking in Kuala Lumpur.

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4 Responses to The Books: At Large and At Small, “Night Owl”, by Anne Fadiman

  1. Kathleen says:

    Thanks for turning me on to Anne Fadiman. I’ve read “Ex Libris” and “At Large and At Small” and they are KEEPERS–permanently on my bookshelf.

  2. Oh, my word. This lark was forced to be an owl on the graveyard shift at the post office for many years and never got used to it. Happily, now that I’m really old I can be a dusk to dawner, sleepwise.

    • sheila says:

      Ugh, graveyard shifts!

      I’m a lark too, most definitely!

      It seems no matter what I do I wake up around 5:30 a.m. Without an alarm. I have really had to focus on changing that – if I need to get more sleep, then I must be able to go back to sleep. It’s been challenging, but I find that if I focus, I will get a couple more hours of sleep and reach the #of hours I’m supposed to. But the pattern is shifting – hopefully it will become second nature eventually.

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