Free At Large and At Small by Anne Fadiman Page A

along with his Roman nose and his shaggy eyebrows, from his father, who would feel he had committed an act of irreparable sloth if he slept past 4:30 A.M. I inherited my owlishness from a fatherwho shares Jimmy Walker’s conviction that it is a sin to go to bed on the same day you get up. Even if he retires at 2:00 A.M. , my father cannot fall asleep without at least an hour of rigorous mental games. (He is thesort of person who could never get drowsy counting sheep; he once told me that he just got wider and wider awake as the numbers mounted, since he had to make sure he was countingcorrectly.) He composes puns, limericks, clerihews, palindromes, anagrams, and alphabetical lists of various kinds. An example of the last of these genres: Excluding the refractory
x
, which was long ago thrown out of the game, proceed through the alphabet from
a
to
z
, finding words that end with the letters
el
. Proper names are allowed. Solution: Abel, babel, channel, diesel, Edel, Fidel, Gödel…and so on. The sailing was reasonably clear until my father got to
z
, a perennial troublemaker. It took an hour, from 4:00 A.M. to 5:00 A.M. , to come up with the name of a fellow reviewer at
The Nation
whom he had last seen sixty years earlier: Morton Dauwen Zabel. My father says that at the moment Mr. Zabel sidled into his consciousness, he was suffused with a sense of transcendent completiongreater than he had ever felt on signing a book contract or closing a deal.
    Insomnia need not be disagreeable. When Annie Proulx can’t sleep, she puts on Quebec reels and dances around for half an hour in her bunny slippers. Until the fantasy wore thin with repetition, F. Scott Fitzgerald quarterbacked the Princeton team to hundreds of nocturnal victories over Yale. Lewis Carroll, like my father,posed himself problems:
    Q: If 70 per cent [of a group of pensioners] have lost an eye, 75 per cent an ear, 80 per cent an arm, 85 per cent a leg; what percentage,
at least
, must have lost all four?
    A: Ten. Adding the wounds together, we get 70 + 75 + 80 + 85 = 310, among 100 men; which gives 3 to each, and 4 to 10 men. Therefore the least percentage is 10.
    Not everyone’s cup of somnifacienttea—but, as Carroll put it, “I believe that an hour of calculation is much better for me than half-an-hour of worry.”
    I feel certain that Morton Dauwen Zabel would never have paid my father an extrasensory visit during the day, nor would Lewis Carroll have performed his amputations with such accuracy had he been operating when the rest of the world was awake. Owls think better at night. It istrue, however, that many people make mistakes when they stay up late. The
Exxon Valdez
ran aground at 12:04 A.M. ; the pesticide tank at Bhopal ruptured at 12:40 A.M. ; the Chernobyl reactor exploded at 1:23 A.M. ; the reactor at Three Mile Island spewed radiation at 3:53 A.M. These accidents were all attributable to human error. But surely the errant humans were among the non-owl 90 percent: dayfolk, maybe even dyed-in-the-wool larks, who had been forced by the exigencies of shift work to disobey the ticking of their circadian clocks. At Three Mile Island, the workers had just rotated to the night shift
that very day
and must have been as groggy as a planeful of New Yorkers disembarking in Kuala Lumpur.
    It was therefore with a distinct sense of unease that I read
Night as Frontier
,a book by a Boston University sociologist named Murray Melbin. Melbin believes that night, like the American West in the nineteenth century, is a territory to be colonized. We have run out of space, soif we wish to increase our productivity and uncrowd our cities, the only dimension we have left to occupy is time: the hours after the normal workday. Many factories have already discovered thatit is cheaper to operate around the clock, even if wages are higher on the nonstandard shifts. If Melbin is right, those factory nightworkers— along with locksmiths, bartenders, bail bondsmen, twenty-four-hour