Murakami doesn’t have a clue what he thinks about when he runs but instead describes the thoughts that go through his head when he is running as being like clouds: “Clouds of all different sizes. They come and they go, while the sky remains the same sky as always. The clouds are mere guests in the sky that pass away and vanish, leaving behind the sky. The sky both exists and doesn’t exist. It has substance and at the same time doesn’t. And we merely accept that vast expanse and drink it in.”
When I nap I may dream, and may even remember some of those dreams vividly, but the balance of my sleeping thoughts are also like clouds, images that “pass away and vanish.”
Murakami relies on the quiet time of running, the time by himself, to maintain his “mental well-being” as well as his physical well-being, which gives him the stamina to keep doing what he does: sitting down to write and focusing on his work.
Napping, too, is a form of withdrawing. You may nap next to someone, but you nap alone—just as you can run alongside others, but you run by yourself. And napping, like running, produces a dream state—a trance, an out-of-body experience of the type that many chase through drugs and raves but that for the lucky are as near as the road or the bed.
Napping also has benefits that running doesn’t.
The greatest thing about a nap is that it gives you two days for the price of one. You have the whole day before the nap, and when you wake up you have a whole day ahead of you.
For me, a perfect weekend day begins with a careful reading of the newspaper in the morning; an early lunch, perhaps with a Bloody Mary, if someone insists; then time with a book. After about forty minutes or so, my eyelids usually grow heavy and the book heavier. So I will certainly doze off.
Reading and naps, two of life’s greatest pleasures, go especially well together. The best thing about a nap that interrupts my reading is that it often enriches my experience of a book by allowing my subconscious to place me in it. During these naps I might find myself galloping across the moors with Heathcliff or spending Mondays and Wednesdays with Morrie. When I wake, an hour or so later, I find the book I was reading splayed open on my chest with a new chapter lodged in my brain. I have all the benefits of time without thought and some new scenes and images as well.
If it’s really a good day I can return to the book for another hour or so. Then I’ll get up, splash some cold water on my face, and take care of some emails or pay some bills until 6:00 p.m., when it’s time for a drink. All week I dream about just this kind of Saturday and Sunday.
I cherish memories of great naps—from my childhood, at my grandmother’s house, resting my head on a needlepoint pillow that said BLESS THIS MESS, and from just days ago.
Sadly, we live in a world that is increasingly intolerant of naps and nappers.
In school, I perfected the art of the in-lecture nap, accomplished by placing my elbows on the desk, lacing my fingers together, and then cradling my head between my thumbs as though deep in concentration—but it’s tough to get away with even this kind of nap in a cubicle or at a shared desk. Colleagues and bosses now expect to hear a certain amount of the key-tapping that has become consonant with work. Screens are programmed to sleep, as are computers, if they aren’t fed a steady diet of numbers and letters by keyboard. And nothing betrays a sleeping worker like a sleeping computer. Ironic that we program our computers to do something that we now deny ourselves.
When there were offices, life for nappers was easier. The open-plan office, with everyone in constant sight of everyone else, is a disaster. So off we go to the break room again and again for coffee, that enemy of sleep, or for a quick trip to Starbucks for a sugar- and fat-filled specialty drink to keep us awake until the commute home.
Following Lin Yutang, I can’t help myself from seeing napping, like lounging in bed awake, not just as a human pleasure but as a human right. The freedom to nap or lounge isn’t quite one of Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms (as enshrined by Eleanor Roosevelt in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights), but maybe it should be the fifth. (Eleanor was, by the way, known to take a power nap prior to giving speeches; Sir Winston Churchill was a great napper, too.)
There are scientific journals full of research on the physical benefits of naps, but none of that interests me. Researching napping is antithetical to the spirit of napping. Murakami, I believe, feels similarly. He mentions the health benefits of taking a nap but follows with the simple admission that he’s always loved napping. You don’t need a reason to do what you do for love.
I recently read a moving article by Toby Campbell, MD, a cancer oncologist who works in hospice and palliative care. He wrote an essay for the Journal of the American Medical Association about how he realized one sunny Wisconsin day that he “had bucket lists all wrong” and that his thinking about what was most important at the end of life needed to evolve. He was visiting a patient named Keith, who had been discharged from the hospital to home hospice with the expectation that he had days to live. But Keith was still alive three months later, though his family had reported that he was now “struggling.” Hence the house-call from Dr. Campbell. Keith’s family and friends had rallied around him—first with one celebration of his life and then, when he didn’t die, with another celebration, and then, when he still didn’t die, a third celebration. Keith was definitely dying—there was no doubt about that—just not as quickly as everyone had expected. Now, he was exhausted, he confided in Dr. Campbell, and not just because of his illness. The problem was that everyone around him was trying so hard to make every moment he had left meaningful that he didn’t have a minute to himself.
Dr. Campbell realized that even though he had cared for many hundreds of people who were dying, his thoughts about the end of life might be misguided: “A continuously intense life can be exhausting. Keith had no bucket list of activities to complete before he died. He longed for a minute that didn’t matter: perhaps for time to take a nap or watch something silly on television without feeling guilt or regret. He needed relief from the feeling that he was wasting precious time, not the added pressure of life’s greatest to-do list. I now realize that humans require down time. Quiet time is necessary to process all that happens to us on a daily basis—let alone over the course of a life.”
Of course, napping is also a privilege. My friends with children and multiple jobs rarely find themselves with time for a nap. But that’s what makes napping that much sweeter for them when they do.
A few years back, I was on a business trip to a town where a friend lived. He picked me up after my meeting, and back we went to his apartment. We had lots to catch up on and much to chat about—it had been months since we had seen each other, and there was that pleasurable giddiness that comes when you have so many topics from which to choose and can alight on this one and that one. Your friends in common? Family? Your ailments? Books and movies?
Soon our conversation turned, as it so often does, to how busy life is. And my friend asked, “Would you like a nap?”
In fact I was desperate for a nap. I had flown in early. I had been worried about my business. The meeting had been stressful.
So he left me for twenty minutes to stretch out on the sofa and close my eyes. He went to the kitchen to send some emails.
“Would you like a nap?” is one of those questions we should ask of one another more often. It’s easy. And it costs exactly nothing.
The Importance of Living includes a section called “The Importance of Loafing.” Here Lin Yutang writes about the horrors of “efficiency, punctuality and the desire for achievement and success.” He calls them “Three American Vices.” He writes, “They are the things that make the Americans so unhappy and so nervous. They steal from them their inalienable right of loafing and cheat them of many a good, idle and beautiful afternoon.”
Happily, these three vices can be kept at bay very simply: Whenever you have the chance, you lie down on your bed and close your eyes.
Giovanni’s Room
Connec
ting
I WALKED INTO the library. My palms were sweating. Not because I was nervous about anything specific, but because at sixteen my palms were always sweating. They were permanently clammy. Just as my face was permanently spotty, studded with angry pimples in various shades of pink and red. My hair was floppy and loose and covered my eyes. I’d finally saved enough money to dump my thick plastic glasses for a cooler pair—dark and round, like the ones John Lennon had. But my palms betrayed my efforts to be cool.
It was a warm day, and all the other kids were out playing sports or pretending to study or listening to the Grateful Dead or smoking in the woods. I was the only one at the library. And I wasn’t sure what I hoped to find.
The library was a squat, stone building on a pond. Even without the air-conditioning turned on, it was always cool. The foyer held the card catalog and the desk of Miss Locke, the librarian. Past that was a grand reading room, with leather chairs and brass lamps. Beyond that, to the left, right, and center, were open stacks, with study carrels. There were more of these on the second floor, and a whole floor of open stacks below.
Though I would not have admitted it to myself, I was hoping to find Miss Locke at her desk. She always had the most amazingly delicious chocolate-chip brown-sugar brownies. She also always had a kind word for me—a funny, sly one, something that told me that we were on the same side, that we understood things others didn’t.
But today she wasn’t there. So I wandered around. I visited some of my favorite sections. I stopped by poetry, where I pulled from the shelf the collected works of Robert Frost. I went by drama, and pulled William Inge from the shelf, so I could flip to The Dark at the Top of the Stairs and revisit the monologue that always broke my heart, in which the boy, soon to die from suicide, remembers the time he was able to leave military academy to spend two whole days with his mother, and how he took her to dinner, out dancing, and to a show.
I was actually quite an outgoing kid, and I enjoyed the company of others. I knew this business of hanging out in the library and pulling favorite books from the shelves that had nothing to do with homework would make me seem aloof and pretentious and would puzzle most of my peers, so I kept it to myself.
And then I noticed the library cart, the one Miss Locke wheeled around as she returned to the shelves the books that kids had borrowed, or had simply taken down and then left out, like dirty dishes on a table, waiting for someone else to attend to them.
On the cart was a book. Just one book: The Little That Is All by John Ciardi. I picked it up and read the back of the book, which told me that this poet had “over the past thirty-odd years brought out ten volumes of poetry, a complete translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy, a collection of his columns, Manner of Speaking, with numerous volumes of children’s verse.” Ciardi had become famous in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when poets were still famous.
I read some pages at random and then checked it out. It was not verse for children.
The poems spoke to me in a way that I think I would have found hard to explain, if I had attempted to do so, which I didn’t.
There was one about washing your own feet. It includes the line “Washing my feet, I think of immortal toenails.” I instantly loved that poem.
A poem called “East Sixty-Seventh Street” about the poet Frank O’Hara’s death had a phrase that stuck with me: “suffering not to suffer / but because we are what we are and some of it hurts.”
Most of all I loved “A Poem for Benn’s Graduation from High School.” Its last stanza reads: “…It does not, finally, / take much saying. There has even been time / to imagine we have said ‘Goddamn it, I love you,’ / and to hear ourselves saying it, and to pause / to be terrified by that thought and its possibilities.”
I memorized as many poems as I could.
When I returned the book the next week, again I missed Miss Locke and her famous brownies. But again I found one book on the cart.
I wish I could remember what that book was, but I can’t. What I do remember is that the next time I went I did find Miss Locke there, and we talked at greater length than we ever had before, and from then on I would tell her what I was reading, often a book from the cart, but she would never acknowledge that she’d left anything there specifically for me. Sometimes in these conversations she would recommend a book to me. The books she suggested were usually vaguely apt, the kinds of books she suggested to lots of kids, books that most people my age at that school seemed to like. But the ones I found on the cart were different. They were books, I believed, that spoke directly and peculiarly to me. Sometimes they were books that you wouldn’t normally recommend to a young man in the 1970s at a boarding school, like The Loom of Youth by Alec Waugh, brother of Evelyn, who made his name with this novel of a gay scandal at a British public school. Sometimes they were books of poetry, always very accessible, but not what everyone else was reading, not Frost, not e e cummings, but more volumes of Ciardi, and Marianne Moore, and H.D. Once it was, surprisingly, Our Bodies, Ourselves, that life-changing bible for liberated 1970s women. On reflection, maybe that wasn’t left on the cart for me.
It was a parallel curriculum to the one I was studying in my formal classes. And there was no particular thread—the works jumped around genre and history. But I believe that (Our Bodies, Ourselves aside) they were selected for me and only me.
Of course, Miss Locke must have realized that I was gay a short time after I finally began to fully admit it to myself. Nobody but a gay boy obsessively rereads the monologue from The Dark at the Top of the Stairs or any plays by William Inge—or really any plays at all, for that matter. Not at an Episcopal boarding school in the 1970s. And nobody but a gay boy attempts Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater, a book so stultifying it’s impossible to imagine anyone today getting through it. The only reason I even knew about it was because I had started reading everything I could about Oscar Wilde, including Son of Oscar Wilde by Vyvyan Holland, the second of his two boys, who were whisked off to Continental Europe after their father was arrested. Marius the Epicurean was a book Wilde dearly loved by a professor who had a deep influence on him. So I read it.
But, again, this was the 1970s. So I didn’t talk to anyone about Wilde or about my being gay. And Miss Locke didn’t talk about it. She just left books for me.
Eventually she would leave for me Gore Vidal’s gay novel The City and the Pillar and Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin, the 1956 novel about the love between two men: one American and one Italian. It’s narrated by David, the American, on the eve of Giovanni’s execution for murder—and tells in flashbacks its story of love, betrayal, and jealousy. The title refers to Giovanni’s one-room apartment in Paris, a place where he and David were for a time happy together.
I wept extravagantly over Giovanni’s Room, for Giovanni and for David. I was a dramatic fellow. Maybe that was my nature—and maybe it also came from all those afternoons in the school library reading William Inge and Oscar Wilde and the plays of Tennessee Williams. But even at my most self-absorbed, I was aware that, except with regard to being gay, my life wasn’t very similar to the lives of either of the characters in that book, or to Baldwin’s.
And yet having that gay thing in common was still something. It was a time of high stakes when it came to being gay. That year, Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in America, was gunned down, along with San Francisco’s mayor; their killer would receive a sentence of just seven years, of which he would serve five, after his attorneys argued that his mental state was caused by eating too many Twinkies. The previous year, Anita Bryant had launched a vicious national crusade against lesbian and gay people that was enthusiastically embraced by millions. There were no gay characters on television or in mainstream movies, save for ones who wound up killing themselves or someone else. Discrimination of all sorts was totally legal, nationwide, and would be for decades to come. Gay, lesbian, and transgender people were publicly reviled, with the threat of violence always present. (Of course, m
any forms of legal discrimination are still intact to this day, and the United States can be a dangerous place for LGBT people, especially for transgender women of color.)
At my school, there had never been, as far as I knew, a single openly gay person in the student body or on the faculty. I believed that if anyone found out I was gay I would have to leave the school I loved.
It would certainly be too dramatic to say that the books Miss Locke left for me saved my life. But it has become clearer and clearer that these books helped me create a vision of a life that I could look forward to with something other than dread.
Baldwin writes, in the voice of his American character, David:
Giovanni had awakened an itch, had released a gnaw in me. I realized it one afternoon, when I was taking him to work via the Boulevard Montparnasse. We had bought a kilo of cherries and we were eating them as we walked along. We were both insufferably childish and high-spirited that afternoon and the spectacle we presented, two grown men jostling each other on the wide sidewalk and aiming the cherry pits, as though they were spitballs, into each other’s faces, must have been outrageous. And I realized that such childishness was fantastic at my age and the happiness out of which it sprang yet more so; for that moment I really loved Giovanni, who had never seemed more beautiful than he was that afternoon.
The life Baldwin promised in that one passage was something extraordinary. I didn’t have to imagine a life where I could live like that; Baldwin had imagined it for me. And even the grim words and scenes that follow didn’t diminish for me the magic of that promise.
Shortly after reading Giovanni’s Room, I would come across a quote from Baldwin:
You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.