Upon a collapsing night.

A little insomnia is not useless for appreciating sleep, for casting some light into that night. Never have I known such a pleasant suffering as the sensation of sleep pelting my body, eager to install its pale softness, to numb my soul fragmented by the light of the preceding day, preventing the night from engulfing the living fragments from outside that seek to penetrate my inner spaces. This white, heavy ache made me turn and twist in the sheets, push away the union of my closed eyes with their pink eyelids. I blended with the walls traced with hooked shadows swaying across the surface, feeling luminescences pierce my insomniac limbs. A little insomnia hooks the thread of thoughts onto easy paths that prolong life, for every action of the mind is effortless if it is not subjected to reality. The act of sleeping and living within one’s dreams remains suspended in a kind of reality that does not belong to the world of the living. Any gesture undertaken in a drowsy dream cannot submit to the difficulties of this outer life. By contrast, every thought born during insomnia remains within reach of being lived, which is why for hours I stayed in bed, embracing the sheets coiling around my body. The sensation of salivating thoughts moistening the thick eiderdown against the skin comes with the risk, for the one who inhabits that skin—who is not yet asleep and seeks sleep as a deliverance without truly wishing to reach it—of being coddled by the abyss of a sleep that would come to fish out, to tear away living thoughts and offer them to the ease of a life endowed with sleep and rest, thus depriving one of an accessible reality. When, before sleeping, I felt the shroud of insomnia cover my forehead, arms, and legs, insinuating itself beneath the nails of my toes, I became mad with life; I saw everything. There were the night-shadowed walls of a grey room on a winter night, the pearled vapours of a summer night. The memory of all the other nights spent and all the rooms in which I had not slept filled my body with infernal voluptuousness. Sleep that does not come suspends its promises of dreams, and so one must create them oneself.

Upon a Norwegian summer day.

A dream can only be apprehended when it is lived as a reality. If it is not acknowledged as such, it cannot be seized. The insomniac sleeper is brought to the limits of whether their reality is reliable or not. Because they wake without having fallen asleep, their body does not know whether they have dreamed or whether their reality is spilling over. They wake as from a convalescence—from those things that perhaps were only fantasised. Not knowing insinuates doubt upon wakening. So their eyelashes remain stuck together by a desire to flee. Do not wake yet, blink and squint, shake it off! You must revive yourself. A scent of bedsheets lingers, wedged in the drowsiness of their nostrils. They want to peel it away as one would a nightmare.

The insomniac sleeper steps outside, breath into the landscape. The air is bracing, hilted with trees. They face the sill of a Norwegian summer day. They roll a piece of orange in their hand, feeling the spongy thickness ooze a soft, precarious juice. The oily peel fondles this aching morning. They tear it open and pierce the pulp. Some sense of a lucid darkness remains, although the sunlight never left. Their fingers are sticky. Day and night have hung their coats together, preparing themselves to work side by side for longer. Like the insomniac sleeper who did not close an eye, day and night in summertime can only look through each other’s eyelids, without ever truly being able to make space for one another. It is a burst sphere set down upon a plate.

Beauty here offers itself each morning the dignity of being loved. It is the sun that rises to reveal the warm grace of dawn. It is the clouds, emerging damp from the pale night. Light blooms like a fresh waterfall, dazzling, limpid waters. Early day is in love. Dawn murmurs. The wise aurora absorbs the ephemeral, aware of the brevity of its time. As day breaks, a veil of dew lifts into the polish of the sky. It is a silver mist floating through the cabin. The sky puts on a garment of alleged beginnings. The sun of an everlasting early day deepens its shadow as golden oil traces there a transparent curve—milk of light upon the earth. A glance at the architecture of clouds: blue columns, figures of angels. A reflection spills over the dew, a drawing of time as it evaporates. The day grows old through its images. Without catching its breath, it flows deliberately toward an evening that pretends to fall. Sunset pastel spreads across the rough canvas of the earth. The golden disc turns to silver; a moon-shadow pierced by the sun, swaying. Nevertheless, it must reappear from behind the mountain. For weeks, we pass through a single day: the longest one, made of bricks, cementless, of twenty-four-hour props of light. With fascination, it runs through our veins. Through the wings of our ever-beating gaze, we love it and its fleeting splendors. We remain within this day until night finally comes, once more watering smiles and tender words, until it falls under the authority of the stars that watch without compassion.

Here at the cabin we have shut ourselves within a time-suspended passage. Froth evaporates so quickly in the sun; it is a matter of freedom. The lake is tranquil, its patient algae wavering. Bare-bodied in water, ankles sinking into silky sand, I feel a velvet pressure from below. As the ripples darken with shadows, I gaze at the forest. I think: do not shiver. The trees stand in a frieze, there to hold me. I am entering a realm of eternal balance. I look at the beauty that this morning burst open, sprang forth, and cast its gleam upon the lake’s surface. It is a clasp of love, an offering to the endless day. It closed upon my face the pulpy claws of a life in color.