Miles to go before I sleep
March 23rd, 2009 § 8 Comments
Robert Frost
For the past 6 months, I have had to stay up late most nights to work on my thesis, usually until 4 am but sometimes longer. That is because I find it harder to focus before midnight. There is always the temptation of cinema, literature, music or the company of friends, so I always have to remind myself of Frost’s famous response to a similar situation: ‘But I have promises to keep/And miles to go before I sleep’.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert FrostWhose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Another of my favourite Frost verses is Acquainted with the Night, and though my own experience of burning the midnight oil is not nearly as melancholy as his suggests, he seems well attuned to the requisite solitude the writer needs—not to mention the often attendant insomnia:
That’s me about 8 years back. Today I can explain. :P
:D Glad to see you can manage a greeting, the watchman is probably just as isolated out there. We need to have a word with Frost :P I’m more apt to smile and strike up a conversation myself. Creatures of the night are always interesting characters.
Its one of my favourite poems, i had it memorised once, now i have forgotten a little bit but it still is enchanting.
i love the poems by wordsworth too, his simple beauty is too appealing.
Oh, pfeh, Frost. They made us read him in High School and I found him so boring and trite! My teacher made us write a poem in the manner of Frost and I wrote one dissing the snot out of him in the manner of Richard Brautigan. I got the highest grade in the class for it.
But there was one of his I always liked, because it spoke of the brutality of essence, or what he took to be essential anyway:
Emily Dickinson, I felt, and still do, beat the daylights out of him… effortlessly. My favorite of hers:
This isn’t a funeral dirge. It’s about real life, a true human, in the world. It blows my mind with its profundity.
In any case, I formed an idea in my youth about why I could not seem to buckle down to anything the way I needed to address the stuff that was vital to me until, like you, about midnight to four or five. I was too sensitive to all the energies of the waking world. Even living alone in my own house, I was not alone. I was too full of all the lives around me. When everyone around was asleep, I could finally function the way I function. That was the only explanation that made sense.
White noise contains way more than just aural over stimulation.
Of course, this is known as a sleep disorder in medical circles, but I don’t think they know what they’re talking about. :-P
That teacher’s name was Mrs. Hinz, and she had a silent teaching assistant who never assisted named simply H, but one could feel his approval or disapproval very strongly.
It just occurred to me they might be heavily responsible for encouraging my contrarian streak, and my livelong urges and urgings to dig deeper into things.
Well… not, maybe, the latter…. That’s probably my mother’s fault, since she is The Tooth Fairy, obsessed with appropriateness and other dangerously superficial things, but it really is so true that teachers can have a lasting impact on their students. It’s an awesome responsibility, and so I have to admire Mrs. Hinz and H back there in my own pages for not grasping their own ideas and plans so tightly they strangled their students with them.
“When everyone around was asleep, I could finally function the way I function.” Same here. Mozart said something similar about the process of creative solitude:
Well, then, it’s settled! The three of us are creative geniuses! :-P
Actually, though, seriously, the great part is that this unbidden stuff one comes out with at these moments, or hours, is in reality also our own mind, but it is the part that has nothing to do with language, even though it seems just like regular thought.
I can’t tell you how many times words came to me that were so gorgeous I had to run to write them down, but unerringly weren’t there as the pen hit the paper… evaporated like a vivid dream you know you had but cannot recall more than that. It finally came to me, smoking a cigarette on the back steps overlooking a small swimming pool in a swanky neighborhood in Los Angeles, of all the awful places, that this happened to me because those words were not words at all! They were my thoughts without the overlay of language, the very neural impulses, the true intelligence, that gave rise to language to begin with and now are almost completely subsumed by language.
Language is hugely inarticulate! It’s horrifying!
I’d never noticed until that moment that those gorgeous words were not words at all! Since they came to me and I understood their meaning and beauty so well it didn’t occur to me to check that they were actual words or just actual understanding that needed articulating badly… but might well remain impossible for language to cover forever. We do so desperately need to evolve, grow up, live up to ourselves!
I can’t express the intensity of my feeling about this.