bookshelf project 8: woolgathering by patti smith

“I slept so long a time that the vendors serving afternoon lunch had already departed when I woke.”

When I think of sleeping midday, I think of being in Madrid, peeling off my dress and falling asleep in my bra and tights after lunch. Being a person that slept through the afternoon and woke back up to stay out until sunrise suited me. Maybe because that’s what I’m like, maybe it’s because I was nineteen.

There is something illicit about being asleep when everyone else is awake or being awake when everyone else is asleep. The world feels like your own strange place again. Funny how such little shifts in the day can make it feel alien.

Last night we stayed up until 1:30am so we could watch a meteor shower. At another time or in a different city, leaving the house after midnight wouldn’t be much of anything to remark on. It might even be the ideal time to leave, the time when the party really got itself into full swing. But now, in quarantine, it feels even more exciting than it might have before.

We drove to an abandoned lot off the Blue Ridge Parkway and got out of the car, bundled in sweaters and scarves. The wind was strong and threatened to blow away all of the blankets we had brought. B brought three moving blankets to keep us warm and so we were rolled up against one another as if we were a large piece of furniture accidentally misplaced in a field of tall grass. Meteors streaked across the sky as the wind whipped against us. There was almost no one on the highways, definitely no one else driving by the lot we’d found. We were watching the Lyrids, which are the glowing tail of a particular comet, Thatcher, that’s been orbiting the sun for 2,600 years. Humans have been recording seeing these comets since China in 687 BC. I like the feeling of experiencing something someone long ago has experienced. I like thinking about the continuity of human experience.

This summer when I was in Granada, I saw the plaque commemorating the place where Washington Irving, the author of the most famous nap-taker in history, Rip Van Winkle, wrote another one of his famous works, Tales of the Alhambra. The tales are a set of pieces written about his experience of La Alhambra in Granada, Spain. When I saw it, I was walking across the old stones and lattice-worked windows of the Moorish castle with a phone in my hip pocket and an audio guide in my ear. It was midday and hot, so hot the landscape around us seemed like it must be paper thin. I couldn’t conceive of how any of the plants could be alive or could have retained any of their water. In one courtyard, the sun beat so hot and direct on the white marble lions that I couldn’t look directly at them. The heat is so oppressive there, it is no wonder the whole world goes to bed at three pm. I wonder if the Spanish siesta, ever more important in Granada, where the afternoons are deathly hot, is where the inspiration struck for the extraordinary sleep of Rip Van Winkle.

I liked wandering around the palace, wondering what thoughts Irving might have been having. I liked, last night, wondering what it looked like to see the sky streaked with light back in 687 BC. How much brighter and more frightening did the meteor flashes look in a sky not at all polluted with sodium lights and airplanes? How much hotter and decrepit was La Alhambra in 1836? And how much of it is exactly the same? B pointing at the sky, saying did you see that one? Me, looking across the Granada river onto white houses and caves, the sun as hot as it’s ever been? I can’t imagine much of that wonder has changed even a little bit.