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Sentinel
So, the first step to finishing The House of Leaves is starting the book again. I plucked the bookmark from page 135 and started from the begining: page numero uno. When I read that first chapter (or rather the Introdution), I ask myself why I never finished the book. It's brilliant, fantastic, stimulating in both an intellectual and emotional (or rather, gut) sense. Then again, I've read that first quarter of the book a good three times. I like to tell myself that I just wasn't ready for the book - that it isn't my time to delve into it and that portion of myself. That excuse sure beats what I expect to be the real reason I never finished - sheer laziness on my behalf.
A passage in the Introduction caught my attention.
Taken from Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves.
This much I’m certain of: it doesn’t happen immediately. You’ll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.
Old shelters - television, magazines, movies - won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.
Years ago a friend of mine was battling a serious bout of insomnia. She had experienced problems her entire life, but some months, or even years, were worse than others in respect to the insomnia. Other than the occasional night of restlessness, I'd never experienced the inability to sleep. I'm out within five minutes of my head hitting the pillow. So, her quandary was intriguing to me - I wanted to know WHY she just couldn't sleep, what she was feeling and why rest wouldn't come. After a great deal of talking around it, she got to the heart of the matter but prefaced it with the obligatory "you're-going-to-think-I'm-crazy" speech. I waved it away and asked her to continue.
She said that at night, after everyone had dropped off to sleep, she felt like she was the only person to watch over the world - that if she fell asleep then things just might fall apart, that we would all wake up to a radically changed world. As long as someone was conscious and keeping track of the going-ons, then the world would continue to turn as it always did. Sure, it's a silly thought and devoid of logic. There is always someone up - just think of all those who work the night shift or the success of late-night infomercials. But, when you're alone in a house with everyone else slumbering away, it feels like you're the last person alive. Especially out where she lived in the country. I spent many years living on a dirt road away from the city and all life drops off the face of the planet by nightfall.
So, her explanation, though odd, made complete sense to me. I finally understood her problem. And the power of suggestion being what it is, my mind started to drift as I went to sleep as well. It would take me longer to chase down the rest that I wanted until I was awake at 4am, thinking about my 7am wakeup call. It was only a couple months of discomfort and mild insomnia before I got over it and moved on. I haven't talked to her in a year, but I wonder if she is still plagued by insomnia. That little line from the passage brought all this back into my head - "You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay."
A passage in the Introduction caught my attention.
Taken from Mark Danielewski's novel House of Leaves.
This much I’m certain of: it doesn’t happen immediately. You’ll finish and that will be that, until a moment will come, maybe in a month, maybe a year, maybe even several years. You’ll be sick or feeling troubled or deeply in love or quietly uncertain or even content for the first time in your life. It won’t matter. Out of the blue, beyond any cause you can trace, you’ll suddenly realize things are not how you perceived them to be at all. For some reason, you will no longer be the person you believed you once were. You’ll detect slow and subtle shifts going on all around you, more importantly shifts in you. Worse, you’ll realize it’s always been shifting, like a shimmer of sorts, a vast shimmer, only dark like a room. But you won’t understand why or how. You’ll have forgotten what granted you this awareness in the first place.
Old shelters - television, magazines, movies - won’t protect you anymore. You might try scribbling in a journal, on a napkin, maybe even in the margins of this book. That’s when you’ll discover you no longer trust the very walls you always took for granted. Even the hallways you’ve walked a hundred times will feel longer, much longer, and the shadows, any shadow at all, will suddenly seem deeper, much, much, deeper.
You might try then, as I did, to find a sky so full of stars it will blind you again. Only no sky can blind you now. Even with all that iridescent magic up there, your eye will no longer linger on the light, it will no longer trace constellations. You’ll care only about the darkness and you’ll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you’re some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay. It will get so bad you’ll be afraid to look away, you’ll be afraid to sleep.
Then no matter where you are, in a crowded restaurant or on some desolate street or even in the comforts of your own home, you’ll watch yourself dismantle every assurance you ever lived by. You’ll stand aside as a great complexity intrudes, tearing apart, piece by piece, all of your carefully conceived denials, whether deliberate or unconscious. And then for better or worse you’ll turn, unable to resist, though try to resist you still will, fighting with everything you’ve got not to face the thing you most dread, what is now, what will be, what has always come before, the creature you truly are, the creature we all are, buried in the nameless black of a name.
And then the nightmares will begin.
Years ago a friend of mine was battling a serious bout of insomnia. She had experienced problems her entire life, but some months, or even years, were worse than others in respect to the insomnia. Other than the occasional night of restlessness, I'd never experienced the inability to sleep. I'm out within five minutes of my head hitting the pillow. So, her quandary was intriguing to me - I wanted to know WHY she just couldn't sleep, what she was feeling and why rest wouldn't come. After a great deal of talking around it, she got to the heart of the matter but prefaced it with the obligatory "you're-going-to-think-I'm-crazy" speech. I waved it away and asked her to continue.
She said that at night, after everyone had dropped off to sleep, she felt like she was the only person to watch over the world - that if she fell asleep then things just might fall apart, that we would all wake up to a radically changed world. As long as someone was conscious and keeping track of the going-ons, then the world would continue to turn as it always did. Sure, it's a silly thought and devoid of logic. There is always someone up - just think of all those who work the night shift or the success of late-night infomercials. But, when you're alone in a house with everyone else slumbering away, it feels like you're the last person alive. Especially out where she lived in the country. I spent many years living on a dirt road away from the city and all life drops off the face of the planet by nightfall.
So, her explanation, though odd, made complete sense to me. I finally understood her problem. And the power of suggestion being what it is, my mind started to drift as I went to sleep as well. It would take me longer to chase down the rest that I wanted until I was awake at 4am, thinking about my 7am wakeup call. It was only a couple months of discomfort and mild insomnia before I got over it and moved on. I haven't talked to her in a year, but I wonder if she is still plagued by insomnia. That little line from the passage brought all this back into my head - "You'll care only about the darkness and you'll watch it for hours, for days, maybe even for years, trying in vain to believe you're some kind of indispensable, universe-appointed sentinel, as if just by looking you could actually keep it all at bay."
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Anyhow, impressive. I loved reading your post.
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And yes, power over the world, or maybe more in tune with it, or at peace with it - in my case at least. Which maybe is a sort of power over it?
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