Fernando Pessoa in the Existential Dimension of the Horizontal Hours – The Marginalian

One of the most important things I've learned about life is that, in any life of purpose and creative potential, you must be religious and behave as properly in your sleep as in your work. And yet one of the great self-delusions of our culture is the way it wears sleeplessness as a badge of honor on the lap of the ego of success – the religion of productivity has gone beyond the sacrifice of existence, sacrificing even that precious night's absence of alert thought and the metabolic urgency needed to recover, reset, restore, in a new sense, to begin deeply.

A sleep problem is a life problem and indicates a troubled life – because sleep is how most of the body's systems recover; because, ever since evolution established REM in the bird's brain, it has been helping us control our negative emotions; because sleep goes beyond the body, the mind, and the emotions that exist.

No one has written more passionately or insightfully about the dimensions of sleep than the Portuguese poet and philosopher Fernando Pessoa (June 13, 1888–November 30, 1935). A Letter of Sorrow (public library) – a posthumously published masterpiece that also gave us Pessoa on how to be a successful explorer in your life's journey, the problem of love, and how to reveal who you really are.

Pessoa recognizes that, in addition to the biological barrier, all those unresolved worries and our hidden divisions that prevent the eyelids from closing the curtain on the day are the messengers of our existential angst. Struggling with his own, he writes:

I will lie on the bed of life awake, empty and restless, in the ebb and flow of my confused consciousness, like two waves in a dark night where the ends of nostalgia and devastation meet.

While Kafka respects the creative power of the sleeplessness of twelve degrees of north latitude, Pessoa finds in his awareness a strange metaphysical power:

The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone is asleep) slowly gives way to the clear sound of four o'clock in the autumn morning. I've never slept, and I don't expect to. Nothing in my mind could prevent me from sleeping and no physical pain could prevent me from resting, but the painful silence of my unknown body lay just there in the dark, made even worse by the dim moonlight of the street lights. I feel sleepy, I can't even think, I can't sleep. Everything around me is naked, an invisible universe, consisting of the negation of the night. Torn between fatigue and restlessness, I manage to touch – by being aware of my body – the metaphysical knowledge of the mystery of things.

The portal to that mystery, Pessoa observes, is the only self-representation that evokes life:

To give up, to sleep, to replace this awareness from time to time with better things, melting, secretly whispered to a stranger! … The ebb, flow and ebb of the great sea, which runs along the real coast, on the night when one really sleeps! … To end, unknown to the outside, the movement of branches in the distant rows of trees, the slow fall of leaves, their sound is more noticeable than their fall, the spray of the sea of ​​distant fountains, and all the uncertainty of the parks at night, lost due to the endless conflict, natural labyrinths of darkness! … To give up, finally, but to survive as something else: a page of a book, a lock of moving hair, a stalk of a creeping plant near a half-open window, insignificant steps in a kind of stoop, the last smoke from the village when going to sleep, the whip of the striker, the whip mixed with the road, the morning chaos leaves everything … it is not life…

Behind me, beyond where I lay, the silence of the house touches the infinite.

Sleep, Pessoa believes, allows us to easily empty ourselves and touch the infinite:

There are times when the emptiness of feeling alive reaches the harmony of something beautiful. In the great men of action, that is, the saints, who act with all their feelings and not just a part of them, this empty sense of life leads to infinity. They crowned themselves with the night and the stars, and anointed themselves with peace and solitude. In [them] the same feeling leads to infinity; emotions are stretched, like rubber bands, to reveal the pores of their laxity, false continuity… And in these times both types of men like to sleep, just like the average person who is passive and passive, who is only a representation of the existence of the human species. Sleep is meeting God, Nirvana, anyway. Sleep is the slow analysis of emotions, whether it is used as the atomic science of the soul or left to sleep as the music of our will, a slow anagram of monotony.

Pessoa finally experiences such a moment himself – a moment of profound indifference, on the one hand where he feels that man is most awake to life, to its essence and to its mystery, when he sleeps:

It was only a moment, and I saw myself. I can't even say what I was. And now I'm drowsy, because I think – I don't know why – that the meaning of everything is sleep.

This may be because meaning is often muddled by interpretation, but sleep paralyzes the beating hand of the analytical mind, extinguishes all passing thought for reason, returning us to a state of innocence before narratives of identity and ideas. Pessoa says:

When we sleep we all become children again. Perhaps because in the state of sleep we can do nothing wrong and know nothing about life, the biggest criminal and the most arrogant person is a saint, by the magic of nature, as long as they are asleep.

[…]

All life is a dream. No one knows what he is doing, no one knows what he wants, no one knows what he knows. We sleep our lives, eternal children of Destiny. That is why, whenever this feeling dominates my thoughts, I feel a great compassion that unites all humanity in friendship, all sleeping society, everyone, everything.