Insomnia

Are you ever hounded by Insomnia? I am, on a regular basis, and last night proved to be no exception. Not for nothing was i stood in my under crackers doing the ironing at 4:30am.

Insomnia is a cruel thing, i hope that one day i will be able to discover what it is to turn your brain off and sink into glorious sleep without effort or horse tranquilisers.

Anyway, it got me thinking about soothing/ medatative text as i will often sit and read when sleep does not want to court me.

Here are some of my favourite passages for you to enjoy, who knows they might provide you with some comfort in the early hours.

Title: Moby Dick
Author: Herman Melville

"But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of Saco. What is the chief element he employs? There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleep smoke. Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though the picture lies thus tranced, and though his pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were in vain, unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies - what is the one charm wanting? - Water there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagra but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to Rockaway Beach? Why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or another crazy to go to see? Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you yourself feel such a mystical vibration, when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land? Why did the old Persians hold the sea holy? Why did the Greeks give it a separate deity, and own brother of Jove? Surely all this is not without meaning. And still deeper the meaning of that story of Narcissus, who because he could not grasp the tormenting, mild image he saw in the fountain, plunged into it and was drowned. But the same image, we ourselves see in all rivers and oceans. It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life; and this is the key to it all."

Title: Narziss and Goldmund
Author: Hermann Hesse

"Yes, there was one such magic. This loveliness must re-shape itself in his soul, his hands inform it, and preserve. With delight and fear he perceived how full his mind had grown of images, how many shapes this long, dread journey had left inscribed upon his heart. Forms thronged and jostled within him, till he longed for quiet, to see them all, and release them into living permeance. More eager, more alert, more curious, he went on, with searching eyes, and passionate senses, but restless now, for clay and wood, for paper, charcoal, and a workshop."

"But as, today, after long experience, he came back to them, his soul scarred by the world, full of the urgent need for quiet and thought, their old, stern forms suddenly moved him, with a force and power he had never known. Piously he stood before their reverence, in which still beat the heart of a perished day, the fears and raptures of many dead, held in strong lines above the centuries, defying the brittleness of time. A feeling of deep awe and love of them stole into his heart as he gazed, and he shuddered at his wasted, burnt-out life. "