“The importance of insomnia is so colossal that I am tempted to define man as the animal who cannot sleep,” E. M. Cioran once wrote. Sleep—which, when things go well, consumes a third of our lives—poses two opposed existential perplexities. The first is about consciousness: we know that we sleep, but cannot know that we are sleeping, since sleep is, in its nature, non-present. The second perplexity has to do with what we can, in fact, remember, and that is the experience of dreams. While engaged in the non-knowable act of sleeping, we also learn nightly that it is possible to know that we have had vivid, intense, unforgettable experiences that are, at the same time, delusions. Sleep tells us that there are black holes outside the possibility of narrative description; the dreams we have when we’re sleeping tell us that our entire existence might be a narrative fiction. “How do we know it’s not a dream?” is the perennial philosopher’s question, the red-pill dilemma. We’ve all felt that initial squeeze of relief—oh, it was just a dream!—turn into sadness: Oh, he’s not alive again. It was only a dream. And so the contradiction: we cannot narrate our experience of sleep, even though our dreams are so much our primary experience of narration that we use them as a metaphor for our most extreme actualities. “It was like a dream,” we say of something piercingly happy; “It was a nightmare,” for something piercingly sad.
How to sum up this book? Much like the woman whose story it tells, it is complex, multi-layered, a combination of the facets of life experiences, both good and bad, a tough shell concealing a huge heart, all underlain by a steely grit, a determination not to be anyone’s victim but to rise up, shouting.
In “Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life,” the philosopher Agnes Callard aims to rewind the tape to the beginnings of Western thought, where we can see its mechanisms in vivid relief. “What is thinking?” she asks. The Socratic dialogues—the few dozen semi-fictional texts in which Socrates is a main character, written in the fourth century B.C. by Plato, Xenophon, and others—explored a range of subjects, from the nature of virtue to how we should live with the certainty of death. But they were most important because they modelled a new and powerful way of applying our minds to the questions that matter. What was it?
I’m fortunate to have taken several of Fowler’s ten rural walks in Britain along with a number of similar routes. But my ignorance limited me to enjoying the immediate beauties of the landscape, the abundance of what William Blake called a green and pleasant land. What I missed and Blake captured was the background reality of “dark Satanic mills.” The hidden history that Fowler exposes is the dark past that made the beauties possible.
In a refreshing blend of biography, criticism and social history, divided into three generations, the dance writer Sara Veale presents the women who propelled modern dance into the mainstream. Veale focuses on the decades between the 1880s and the 1960s, a period of political upheaval, civil rights movements, war and social change, all of which began seeping into the dance narrative, providing an alternative to enchanting love stories and tales of tragedy. Yet it wasn’t until the likes of Loie Fuller, Maud Allan and Isadora Duncan – the “Mother of Modern Dance” – took to the stage at the turn of the 20th century that the medium gained widespread success.