The Indulgence of Sleep
A brilliant passage from Shola von Reinhold’s LOTE, which is so far my novel of the century.
“A lack of sleep leads to fascism, you know, Griselda.” I decided it would be a good time to expound my theory: the sort of people who claim to require a few hours a night frequently happen to be morally bankrupt. This did not include people who couldn’t get a decent number of hours’ sleep because of insomnia, work or children and so on, but rather people who claim not to need it and thus exhibit their own productiveness. These people included various right-wing politicians, dictators and numerous CEOs, regularly dubbed “The Sleepless Elite” by business magazines. Implicit in their claim is that everyone in the world aught to relinquish sleep if they want to escape hardship. That you are being indulgent. Perhaps their own lack of sleep causes this way of seeing: they are seriously sleep-deprived without realising they are, and after this long-term deprivation, their capacity for empathy has dwindled.
I remember something Tom Hodgkinson said in the Idler in the late ’90s: he was responding to Tony Blair making the perennial Thatcherite claim that he doesn’t sleep very much and in fact doesn’t dream. Tom contrasted Blair’s strange boast to Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream,” arguably the most affecting and important political statement of all time.
I suppose the dictators and CEOs observed by Shola von Reinhold think they’re being stoical or independent-minded in some way with their claims to supernature, but it’s hardly inspiring to have a leader who boasts of being deprived and, in Blair’s case, unimaginative.
If you’re looking for new year’s resolutions, you could do worse than buying and reading LOTE and learning to nap.
About Robert Wringham
Robert Wringham is the editor of New Escapologist. He also writes books and articles. Read more at wringham.co.uk