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dualistic, as befits a people so extraordinarily idealistic that the mind can never feel quite
at home with anything as lowly as matter.
Take, for example, the business of staying in bed. Among the hard-working American
middle classes, this is not the most popular of pastimes. Americans tend to rise in the morn-
ing earlier than Europeans, and go to bed earlier as well. There are clear economic motives
for this, but also, one suspects, a queasy puritan sense that indulging the body by not drag-
ging it brutally out of bed at the crack of dawn is somewhat sinful. An American mother I
know used to run the washing machine and make school lunches for her children at three
o'clock in the morning. People who do this should be handed lengthy prison sentences.
Visitors to the States who stay in hotels will have had the traumatic experience of hearing
what sounds like a dam bursting around six o'clock in the morning. This is the sound of
fifty showers being switched on, at an hour when any civilised human being would still be
agreeably unconscious.
Americans do not seem to realise what a rich, fruitful, endlessly fascinating pursuit stay-
ing in bed can be. Rather as English aristocrats have taken centuries to perfect the art of
doing nothing at all, a strenuous, demanding affair which requires a good deal of skill, per-
sistence and unflinching concentration, so staying in bed can be a passion, a vocation, a
religion, an existential commitment, a whole way of life. Those who stay in bed form a
kind of secret spiritual aristocracy. They are a cosmopolitan confraternity, recognisable to
each other by certain shyly murmured passwords and esoteric handshakes. Sometimes they
compete with each other to see who can remain supine until dinner time, sternly suppress-
ing any ignoble impulse to get up. They do not regard sleeplessness as a virtue, any more
than insomniacs do.
Americans, by contrast, like to be up and doing. They find it hard to savour the delights
of passivity. They are relatively unfamiliar with the spiritual treasures to be reaped from
being acted on rather than acting. For them, there is something both guilt-making and un-
manly about such a condition. Steve Jobs's sister, thinking she was paying him a compli-
ment, described his death as something he “achieved.” Simply to have something happen
to you is unthinkable. It undermines the vital business of being in control. Bed is where
the body refreshes itself in order to plunge back into action. To enjoy it for its own sake is
mildly perverse, rather like enjoying having rabies. The Duke of Edinburgh was once hor-
rified to discover that his son Prince Charles actually reads in bed. Reading for the Duke is
something of a degenerate activity in any case, but to confuse sleeping and waking life in
this way struck him as morally pernicious. Bed is a preparation for activity, not a condition
to be enjoyed in itself. It is certainly not a place in which to indulge such wimpish pursuits
as learning about the secrets of the Pyramids or the inner life of vegetables, as the New
Ageist Charles probably does.
Nature and the Will
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