Lennon, Brian. "Sleep." The Gettysburg Review 12.1 (Spring 1999).

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

Sleep
Brian Lennon

At first things collide, collude, drive you along; only later do they begin to fall apart, according to the tropes essays are fond of. You move in a kind of trance, the blind trust that day after day brings somehow usable experience, adds to your résumé, and that even if you are only waiting, something is bound to happen that will clarify just what was all along at stake. In my case, it was not until I left New York that I had the faintest idea of what I ought to have been doing there. But it is a privilege to speak of one's experience as though it were unique, not quotidian, not irreducibly ordinary. In complex moments when my window framed an indigo dawn, or the lunch-hour inferno, or a sunset of profound silhouettes, I knew that nothing could be further from the truth. The pageantry of Upper Broadway furnishes proof: fistfights, arguments, embraces, self-conscious posturing of all kinds; the way people walk or set their mouths when they feel threatened, or angry; favor and petition flickering on faces. And those silhouettes. "Blank windows," Crane wrote, "gargle signals through the roar."

But he was picturing the subway. Under the ground of the self, too, there is a system: lanterns and signs, spelling out something. But what? Regret, ambition, hope, despair; wreckage and splintering and boredom. And other, happier, more wholesome modes and tropes. For the others, in my memory of New York I retain a composite, surface image: a kind of heart's photograph. In this picture, boxy yellow cabs glide serenely through the midday autumn mist; a theater marquee, right center, has several letters missing; yellow light floods through the glass doors onto the pavement. A human figure stands there, pondering. The marquee is pitched just slightly over his head. The film is entitled Sleep.

*

You don't always know that you are lonely. You may feel free, or intrepid, or stoical; you may tell yourself that you are waiting. But you can run out of time, and, what's worse, out of faith, the certainty that what should happen, will. "The worst part"---this is Céline's Bardamu, ranting in Journey to the End of the Night---"is wondering how you will find the strength tomorrow to go on doing what you did today and have been doing for much too long, where you'll find the strength for all that stupid running around, those projects that come to nothing, those attempts to escape from crushing necessity, which always founder and serve only to convince you one more time that destiny is implacable, that every night will find you down and out, crushed by the dread of more and more sordid and insecure tomorrows."

It is a shock to see finally that your life is an act of waiting and deferral, of refusing and seeking in vain---of being unable to live, in so far as living means living now and not at some other time. That you are a somnambulist, alive and yet insentient, in a kind of dream of private language. I am not talking about advance regret, as in Larkin's "As Bad as a Mile," or a theologically fluent atheism, the disease of middle age; nor do I mean a balanced looking to the future. I mean the appetite for life elsewhere, in some secular heaven, to cross into which one only requires the plenum that relentlessly fails to appear. When now, from a safe distance, I reflect on a certain interlude of atrophy, I can hear myself say without conviction: "Tomorrow, tomorrow, the life I desire will begin."

*

For a long time I was dependent on New York. I was drifting away from old friends and failing to find new ones, and Upper Broadway, headlamp- and storefront-lit, roared along by buses and yellow cabs, became the panacea. No matter how dreary or enraging the office day, when I hit the street after happy hour with my earphones and coffee, I knew the inexplicable consolation of island Manhattan. Music made of it all a kind of anarchic ballet: an unending run of faces expressing pain, fury, happiness, and hope, and the sheer bustle of it all, the conatus of eight million solitudes: all this spectacle prevented me from thinking too deeply about what I was doing with my life, and why.

At first, I was on my own. It was a summer of city noise, and long shadows, and almost unendurable heat. I walked the sun-baked pavement to work at a bookseller by day, and at night I wrote paragraphs that began like this:

The horse comes up the alley, kicking bottles with his hooves, and stands underneath the window breathing.

and

What about the sun? It's gone. There's nothing but electric light. It's been that way for a long time.

I spent most of my time alone. I earned just enough to get by, and I used my clerk's discount to advantage. After years of programmatic reading, I was dancing through books, moving on at whim or by allusion. When I returned from work at six o'clock, I poured myself a drink, cooked dinner, and sat down to a night of reading and aborted stories.

My window opened into an alley. Shadows played on the opposite wall; hot, pungent air swelled from the street-level restaurant. I was happy. I felt that I was on the verge of living, and I was full of hope---a sober confidence that seems, in retrospect, both prescient and naïve; as though the paths I took were wrong, but clearly chosen, in a kind of artless lesson to myself.

*

Three years later, I was still getting by, still writing first paragraphs. Some of my friends had fled the city; others had swerved into ambition or drugged apathy. It had all come to seem mysterious and sad to me, the way so many people doggedly hung on.

When I left the city at last, unalone, I thought that I might never return. I made Rilke's injunction an article of faith: Du mußt dein Leben ändern. In time, I would learn that success in love, that inner polis, is no guarantor of weather, and that under the stress of compromise it is easy to forget your unaccompanied life. Did I need reminders? I knew then that it wasn't the quiddity of New York that had reduced me, but the process, integral to survival, of parting with its myth.

At the time, though, I knew none of this; all I knew was, I was out---I had left New York. It was an act of such vague and, I thought, mysterious portent that its mere iteration---"I left," a kind of benediction---sustained me for an entire year.

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