THE SLEEPLESS MAN
Some of our people are telling us about the best or the most satisfying meal they ever ate. This question of food seems to depend on habit, hunger and personal taste. I saw a man once in a lumber camp eat plate after plate of a stew made of meat, potatoes and carrots—cooked in a big iron kettle over an open fire. At home, this man would have growled at turkey or terrapin, but here he was pushing back his plate again and again asking the cook to put more carrots in. “Why,” he said, “I thought carrots were made for horses to eat. I didn’t know human beings ate them!” He never had been a real human before—not until hunger caught him and pulled him right up to that iron pot. At his club in the city he could not have eaten three mouthfuls of that stew.
It is different with sleep. The man with no appetite can get on after a fashion, but if he cannot sleep he is a pitiable object. I met one once—a rich man who had worked too hard—starved himself for sleep in order to get hold of rather more than his share of money and power. He had passed the limit of nerves and was denied the power of sleeping. A few snatches of rest were all he could get, but through the long still nights he lay awake, thinking, thinking with the constant terror that this would end in a disordered mind.
We sat before this man’s fire late at night, and he told me all about it. To you sleep seems like a very common and simple thing. The night finds you tired and you shut your eyes and before you know it you are sailing off into a peaceful, unknown country. Here was a man who could not sleep. He must remain chained to the cares and terrors of his daily life, and the bitterness of it was that all the money he had slaved so hard to obtain could not buy him what comes to you and me with the mere closing of the eyes. It seemed to me the most despairing mockery for this man to repeat Sir Philip Sidney’s “Ode to Sleep”:
“Come sleep; O Sleep! the certain hour of peace,
The baiting-place of wit, the balm of woe,
The poor man’s wealth, the prisoner’s release,
The indifferent judge between the high and low;
With shield of proof, shield me from out the prease
Of those fierce darts Despair at me doth throw;