The Endgame

Newsletter #86 - The night

Toronto, November 1, 2024

The night

I’ve been thinking about the night, the time when we sleep and dream, when we seek obliviousness but frequently fail to find it, the time we often think of as something that merely punctuates days but in fact is as important as the day itself. The night has its own richness and poetry.

We’re tired. The idea of slipping between the sheets and drifting off to sleep is delicious. Shakespeare: “Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleeve of care, /The death of each day's life, sore labor's bath, /Balm of hurt minds, great nature's second course, /Chief nourisher in life's feast.” (Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 2)

But we are trepidatious as well. We approach bed with apprehension, particularly as we age. We have not been sleeping well lately—in fact, come to think of it, we have not been sleeping well for quite some time. We thrash around. We wake up a lot. We drift in and out of sleep. We have fantastical dreams. As the night moves along, we hear the clock striking in the other room—two o’clock, three, four... Gerard Manley Hopkins: “I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day./ What hours, O what black hours we have spent/ This night!”

Garbage trucks rumble down the street. The bed is a battlefield. We toss and turn. When dawn breaks we are thankful. This night’s struggle is over. As we age, the struggle gets worse.

But tonight, we are sleeping in a house by the sea. The only sounds are the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, the loon crying in the darkness, the coyote howling in the distance across the bay. Perhaps, in this peace, we will sleep the sleep of the innocent and untroubled. But no, it is not like that, even here. “The fall of rivers, winds and seas, Smooth fields, white sheets of water, and pure sky; I have thought of all by turns, and yet do lie Sleepless!” (William Wordsworth, To Sleep)

In this age of little romance, the poetry of the night is replaced by electronic monitoring. If you are kitted out with a sleep tracker, in the morning you can review the statistics of the night that has just passed. My smartwatch tells me that last night my time asleep was 5 hours and 5 minutes. It tells me all sorts of other things, including the percentage of my sleep that was REM, Core, and Deep (look it up), and my heart, respiratory rates and blood oxygen level while I was sleeping. Occasionally in the morning my watch sends me a congratulatory message telling me that I’ve “met my sleep goals.” I am pathetically pleased by this message. Something has been achieved.

But how do you attach numbers with meaning to the “soft embalmer of the still midnight” (John Keats, To Sleep)?

In his poem Night Rhapsody Robert Nichols, one of the great poets of the First World War, writes about the power of darkness: “How beautiful to wake at night,/ Within the room grown strange, and still, and sweet,/ And live a century while in the dark/ The dripping wheel of silence slowly turns...”

The night is an entrancing time, whether you are awake and living a century in the dark, or asleep dreaming. Dreaming takes you to a separate world. I wonder if the dream world is the real world, with the price of admission being consciousness during the inconsequential world of day. The dream world is full of colour and action and people from the past. “In my dreams, /I lasso a wild steer on the first try./ I chauffeur Picasso/ To meet up with Dali.../ I discover my childhood cat in the neighbor’s tree—/ So that’s where you’ve been, you little rascal.” (Gary Soto, In Praise of Dreams)

And then, beyond the poetry of the night, there is the Music of the Night, music that runs through your mind as you try to sleep, and then invades your dreams.

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Note to readers: You may have noticed that this week’s Endgame has been delivered early, on Friday rather than Sunday. That’s because on Saturday I’m leaving on a jet plane to go to London for two weeks. Next week there won’t be a newsletter, but I hope to resume transmission on Sunday, November 17, perhaps with some thoughts about a geezer rattling around in the U.K. with his geezer friends and relatives

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Some reader comments on Newsletter #85 (“Murray’s Walk”) 

From my daughter Gabrielle: “The quote about the crumb of madeleine reminded me of the classic scene in Pixar's Ratatouille, when the cantankerous food critic Anton Ego is wondrously transported back to his childhood with one bite of the titular Ratatouille.”

A Halifax friend writes: “A walk with Murray…memories. It was lovely to tour the route that you two took. The pictures allowed me to “live” it. It brought to mind Richard’s and my walk from the apartment through the Vet. Memorial Cemetery to the Public Gardens in downtown Halifax. Moments shared with someone, precious. As we wind down I find my world is smaller. I like the feeling of acceptance but also the enchanted richness of the moments in time.”

From Jim Turk: “Being approximately the same age as you, I find your reflections particularly relevant. Yours today about Murray was doubly so. Mainly, it brought back memories of a dear friend, who passed away several years ago. But also, coincidentally yesterday, on the anniversary my wife’s death a year ago, I took what seems to be the same walk as you had done regularly with Murray. She and I had lived for some years on Delaware Avenue, just north of College. My walk started at her former house, then I went south to College and along College to Clinton, where I stopped for a veal sandwich at Bitando’s two blocks south of College (after pausing to decide whether I’d get a better sandwich at its cross-street rival San Francesco). Then I went for coffee at Café Diplomatico where I have spent untold hours going back 50 years. My version of the walk, though, was to go back along College, savouring the array of stores including a wonderful new bookstore, to my endpoint on Delaware Avenue.”

From a friend of Murray: “My wife just read your latest Endgame. In tears, she came to find me. We only knew Murray for ten years, but he and I were somehow able to establish a deep understanding in that short time. We also went for walks. Murray would lead us through the ravines.”

And yet another friend of his: “Love your description of how we live with memory and loss, so valuable and comforting. I also somehow flashed on my memory of Joyce's long short story The Dead and the thought of memory of lost ones being an affirmation of life, also a comforting thought.”

Naomi Duguid writes: “Living and reliving, in walks or just mind's-eye recollections, our time with beloved friends or beloved family, is one of life's great pleasures. I like the feeling of keeping the woven fabric of life animated and moving. It warms me. And sometimes I am surprised by new insights and appreciations.”

David Wolinsky comments: “I find nothing untoward about your chats with Murray and wouldn’t be surprised if they occurred more often than every Wednesday, and you needn’t be concerned until he answers. And when you see him again, hopefully not too soon, he’ll tell you he would have been disappointed if you hadn’t taken the time to stay in touch.”

Karen Bayly: “This is such a beautiful tribute. I would love for someone to care about me so much to retread the paths we took together.”

And finally, from my severest critic: “Philip, I read this in a hospital bed. I’m in tears. So beautiful so loving.”