The Art of the Nap

I had on gray wool trousers, a blue shirt, and a four-in-hand knit tie, which I didn’t bother to loosen. My hands were folded together on my chest in the corpse-in-the-casket position, and I hadn’t turned back the bedspread. It was three-thirty on a cold and gray February afternoon. My next appointment was at five o’clock, and there was nothing, at that moment, that I was eager to read. Into the arms of Morpheus I slipped, and for the next half hour I slept, I won’t say like a baby, or like a log, but like what I now prefer to think myself—a man who has mastered, in all its delicate intricacy, the art of the nap.

I did not move, I did not stir. I woke, as planned, without a wrinkle in my shirt, trousers, or cheek, not a hair out of place. A most impressive, if I do say so myself—and at that moment I did say so to myself—performance. Really quite brilliant. The term control freak is almost never used approvingly, I know, but I felt myself at that moment a control freak entirely happy in his work—that is to say, in perfect control. I carefully slipped off the bed and walked into the bathroom, where I gazed at my clear eyes in the large mirror. Another fine nap successfully brought off.

I don’t ordinarily nap on a bed or on my back. As a napmaster, I fear too much comfort and the consequent difficulty of pulling myself out of the pleasures of a too-deep sleep to go back into the world. I also wish to avoid rumpledness, the toll that a nap on one’s back on a couch often takes. Most of my napping therefore is done sitting up, on a couch, shoes off, with my feet resting on a low footstool. Having one’s feet up is important.

Most of my naps—and I usually get, on the average, three or four a week—take place late in the afternoon, around five or five-thirty, with the television news playing softly in the background. As the reports of earthquakes, plagues, arson, pillaging, and general corruption hum on, I snooze away, a perfect symbol of the indifference of man in the modern age. These naps last from twenty to thirty-five minutes. (“A nap after dinner was silver,” says old Prince Bolkonsky in War and Peace, “before dinner golden.”) Should the telephone ring while I am mid-nap, I answer it in an especially clear and wide-awake voice that I don’t usually bother evoking when I am in fact wide awake. Some of these naps leave me a touch groggy, though this soon enough disappears. Usually, they all do the job, which is to help get me through the evening.