The Art of the Nap

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

I not long ago asked a friend, an Englishman, if he naps. 'Whenever possible,' he replied. Prone or sitting up? 'Prone.' On a bed or couch? 'Bed.' Trousers on or off? 'Generally off.' And for how long? 'That depends,' he said, 'on when the cats choose to depart.' Joseph Conrad wrote that his task was 'by the power of the written word . . . to make you see.' The picture of my friend with his cats napping atop him is almost too easily seen.

I nap well on airplanes, trains, buses, and cars, and with a special proficiency at concerts and lectures. I am, when pressed, able to nap standing up. In certain select company, I wish I could nap while being spoken to. I have not yet learned to nap while I myself am speaking, though I have felt the urge to do so. I had a friend named Walter B. Scott who, in his late 60s, used to nap at parties of 10 or 12 people that he and his wife gave. One would look over and there Walter would be, chin on his chest, lights out, nicely zonked; he might as well have hung a Gone Fishing sign on his chest. Then, half an hour or so later, without remarking upon his recent departure, he would smoothly pick up the current of the talk, not missing a stroke, and get finely back into the flow. I saw him do this perhaps four or five times, always with immense admiration.

Certain jobs seem to carry (unspoken) napping privileges. Writing in 1931, H.L. Mencken noted that one of the tests of a good cop was the talent of 'stealing three naps a night in a garage without getting caught by the roundsman.' Surely, movie projectionists get to nap to their hearts' content. Cab and limousine drivers must nap. Napping on the job can scarcely be unknown to psychoanalysts and other workers in the head trades. ('Uh huh,' mumbles the dozing psychiatrist in the caption of a cartoon that shows the feet of a patient who has just jumped out the window.) The only job in which I ardently longed to nap was guard duty in army motor pools on cold nights in Missouri, Texas, and Arkansas. Ah, to have slipped into the back of a deuce-and-a-half (as the big trucks in the army were called) and ZZZ'd out for a quick half hour! But fear, that first goad to conscience, won out and, difficult though it was, I stayed awake.

At a job I held one summer in college at a phonograph needle factory, one of the maintenance men, a dwarfish man of Italian ancestry, regularly slipped up to the fourth floor for a 40-minute shot of sleep. One steamy summer day in Washington, at a meeting of the National Council of the National Endowment for the Arts, I noted an entire half table of council members, heads nodding, necks jerking, eyelids drooping, effectively sedated by a slide show on city planning. I envied them, and doubtless should have joined them but for the fact that I had myself only recently awoken from a delightfully soporific lecture on the meaning of the avant-garde. I have always slept reasonably well during lectures and never better than when a lecturer is foolhardy enough to darken the room for slides.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print