What is a Bed?

    In Chapter V, the protagonist of De Maistre’s Voyage Around my Room (1794)—which we can onlypresume to be a self-insert—comments on the disposition of the bed in his chambre.

A bed witnesses our birth and it witnesses our death: it is the ever-changing theater where the human species enacts, by turns, engaging dramas, ridiculous farces, and horrible tragedies.—It is a cradle decked with flowers;—it is love’s throne;—it is a sepulcher.

This passage concludes the chapter, which began as an illustrative (“a most agreeable perspective”) and demonstrative (“a thousand happy ideas”) account of De Maistre’s transient milieu. The chapter then transitions to his bed, calling it a “piece of furniture in which I sometimes find oblivion” that stimulates meditation and imagination. This makes perfect sense because Voyage Around my Room is less a novel, more a travelogue of adventures outside the perimeters of space. The argument here is that it is difficult to avoid the bed—a place of repose, conquest, and creation—when partaking in the cyclicality of life. We spend much of our lives in the entourage of a bed both physically (resting) and in close proximity to a bed (or of familiar to us as a haven of sleep). The bed, for De Maistre, and the rest that comes with it, cumulates as a transient escape from the literal: “… it is in this cradle of delight that we forget, for one half of our life’s duration, the sorrows of the other half.” It is analogous to a stage made privy to performances of carnal love, birth, and death—“What a bewildering mix of frightful and delightful situations!”

    It is difficult to determine the parameters of sleep as a rhetorical device in theory and literature. It is simply too ambiguous. Psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud argued sleep was an opportunity for the ego to withdraw, the unconscious desires to roam, and the subconscious to nourish desires with “the fruits of fancy” (Coleridge defines fancy as a transformative and associative power of rearrangement). Authour Marcel Proust wrote his masterpiece while bedridden for over a decade. The longest novel ever written, À la recherche du temps perdu, begins with an allusion to sleep: “Longtemps, je me suis couché de bonne heure.” Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote his diary in 170 AB, now sold under the title Meditations, to leave one’s bed is to “[rise] for the work of man.” Aurelius believed humans to be active creatures who are cripped by the passivity of extended comforts, which breed selfishness: “you stop short of what you could well achieve.” Although the consensus on sleep is unclear, I would delegate my personal experience as a lover-of-sleep to De Maistre. What is death but a chance to sleep, perchance to dream as the bard once wrote? What is sleep, but a complete relinquishment of the self to an unknown mastermind?