I snuggled under my covers this Halloween under a blue moon, settled into a calm anticipation for the morning: finally, when I opened my eyes back in Standard Time, I wouldn’t feel as if I’d been pulled out of bed in the middle of the night, stumbling through darkness that seemed entirely too intense for just before 6 a.m. I wouldn’t shout at the alarm clock, and wouldn’t be eaten up by resentment at the mere fact of having to wake up and face the day.
I’ve been confused lately, as it’s taken the sun longer and longer to venture over the horizon: do I really want to sleep longer, or do I just want it to be light out when I wake up? And what’s with this daily railing at the pitch black outside my windows? I’m one of the only people I know who’s never been bothered by winter’s stingy dose of daylight. Plus, oddly enough, since the pandemic began, I’ve been getting regular, wonderful bouts of sleep, my body falling into a circadian routine so predictable, I really don’t even need the alarm clock anymore to notify me it’s time to get up.
So it’s not lack of sleep that’s been making me shake my fist at the waking world. And I don’t really think it’s been the darkness, either, that quiet, shadowy time that offers a chance to ease into the day before the general public starts bustling around. Something else has been trying to pull me back under the covers, and I don’t think it has anything to do with the seasons or the need to snooze a few minutes more.
Andrew Stevovich, Woman with Autumn Leaves. Used on a CC BY-SA 4.0 license via Wikimedia Commons.
In 1819, Washington Irving published “Rip van Winkle,”(1) the tale of a good-natured lazybones beloved by the whole town, a regular in the circle of idle talkers at the little tavern watched over by a portrait of George III, ruler of even his little British colony in the Catskills. But Rip’s wife is always after him to put food on the table, do some work, do something—and after running into the woods to escape her nagging, stumbles upon a party of ghosts, passes out after guzzling their high-powered booze, and wakes up twenty years later to a strange new post-Revolution world.
No one knows him anymore, this guy with a long beard and weird clothes and rusty gun. Everyone’s running around and ranting about politics, and when Rip stumbles into his old drowsy watering hole, George Washington’s portrait is hanging on the wall, and the locals are demanding to know whom he’s voting for. When, puzzled, he replies that he’s just a lowly, loyal subject of George III, the assembly goes after him as a traitor. Obviously, he’s said the wrong thing.
Almost exactly two hundred years after poor Rip was nearly bludgeoned for his ignorance, Ottessa Moshfegh’s 2018 novel, My Year of Rest and Relaxation, appeared. Here was another tale of American transformation, starring a real bitch making use of lots of drugs, lots of sleep, and lots of money to fund her cathartic endeavor, waking up to a world she finally didn’t feel compelled to sneer at—and just in time to open her eyes to the September 11 attacks, to the start of another sort of collective transformation that’s led us to where we are today.
Go to sleep, wake up in a different world, a better one: it was a purposeful project in Moshfegh’s novel, an accidental one in Irving’s short story. Although Rip’s universe has undergone a complete metamorphosis, he’s still his old self—just without the worry of avoiding a nagging wife. Moshfegh’s character has succeeded in a thorough self-transformation, not knowing that her new, more positive character may soon be tested by a country about to undergo its own change for the worse.
As I give each new morning the stink-eye during these last couple of months of 2020, my two compatriots’ stories are sticking with me. I wonder if I’m just angry I can’t pull off my own variety of their tales, and snooze through existence until my own environment has changed.
Cocooning in quarantine has been one thing—but it’s not as if the good old US of A was a friendly place before the pandemic ratcheted up our collective anxieties. Even before we all (well, most of us) learned to wear masks, we were well into a long-simmering cycle of cultural unrest. Early in the twenty-first century, we started to realize that we had not, in fact, reached the end of history—that we couldn’t rest easy in the gentle arms of neoliberalism, that racism wasn’t over, that not everyone was suddenly embracing tolerance and acceptance. Anti-Muslim sentiment spread; the Tea Party reminded us that old racist tropes and feelings had never died out and that ideology could still twist history into its own alternate realities; social media turned isolated whoppers once only found at grocery store checkouts in the National Enquirer into organized campaigns of disinformation and danger. And still, as ugly hatreds and prejudices that had never gone away gained strength and confidence on one side, and as structural inequalities persisted even as another side tried to pretend they weren’t a thing anymore, for the most part, we continued to doze in the belief that our generally peaceful times couldn’t really end, that there was nothing left to achieve and no one left out of the dream.
I can’t say I’m stunned to hear about Trump supporters trying to run Biden campaign vehicles off the road, much as Rip’s fervent compatriots attempted to chase him out of town, or injure him in the process. I’m also unsurprised that the highest office in the land cheers these goons on and continues to incite violence against its own citizens. Trump is just a logical outcome of retrograde malice that’s been stewing for a long time. And so, even if Biden wins the election tomorrow, even if there’s a Democratic sweep of offices, we’re still going to be left with a lot of vicious loathing out there, and it’s not going to shrug its shoulders and declare the better proverbial man the winner if things don’t go its way at the voting booth. Wherever the ballots lead us, we’re all going to have to face up to a lot of long, hard, tiring work.
It’s no wonder I’m tired, even with all the delicious sleep I’m getting, or that every dawn that brings us closer to this election is a little more unwelcome. What would it take for me to wake up and be glad again to see another morning? How long would I have to sleep before I could look out on a planet, or even a country, whose inhabitants have stopped trying to kill, starve, exclude, lock up, steal from, or spit at each other—who are thrilled to see each other’s faces, and eager to imagine the world they can build together, side by side?
(1) The link takes you to an anthology in which the story is included.