'Light a Hundred Candles in Your Brain'

I’ve never read a book that kept me awake at night. I’ve often stayed up too late, even on work nights, when a book wouldn’t let go, but that’s not what I mean. I’m talking about books so exciting, scary or disturbing that even with lights out and head on pillow, their after-life in my brain made sleep impossible. Perhaps I’m just too cold-hearted or tired.

A friend in New York City sent me an entry from a charming little book by Rose Macaulay, Personal Pleasures (1935). The title is explicit. Macaulay fills 365 pages with mini-essays about the mundane things that give her pleasure such as “Hot Bath” and “Taking Umbrage.” Here is an excerpt from the piece my friend sent, “Reading in Bed”:

 

“You are reading, I would suggest, a novel; preferably a novel which excites you by its story, lightly titillating, but not furrowing, the surface of the brain.”

 

Nothing is easier to get lost in than a novel, an alternate world peopled with strangers who are familiar. So far, I’m in contented agreement with Macaulay, who was a good novelist (The Towers of Trebizond, 1956). Here’s where we part ways:

 

“Not poetry; not history; not essays; not voyages; not biography, archeology, dictionaries, nor that peculiar literature which publishers call belles-lettres. These are for daytime reading; they are not somnifacient; they stimulate the mind, the esthetic and appreciative faculties, the inventive imagination; in brief, they wake you up. You will never, I maintain, get to sleep on Shakespeare, Milton, or Marvell, or Hakluyt, or Boswell, or Montaigne, or Burton’s Anatomy, or Sir Thomas Browne, or Herodotus, or any poetry or prose that fundamentally excites you by its beauty, or any work that imparts knowledge. These will light a hundred candles in your brain, startling it to vivid life.”

 

She wipes out more than half my library. I should add that I’ve never used a book as a soporific. Reading is an end in itself. All of the forms and writers Macaulay lists I’ve read in bed, on the couch, in a hammock, at my desk, in an airplane. The setting is less important than time and sufficient light.