Insomnia. Marina Benjamin

for she is defiant, self-denying, determined, and capable of enduring great hardship and sorrow. It is not my kind of heroism, that is for sure, but the alternative is deeply unpalatable. Most critics of classical literature fix on the shroud that never gets finished to insist that Penelope’s chief quality is wiliness or cunning. In their book, she is just another woman who weaves lies.

      I want to say more about insomnia and love, in that both are states of being that pitch us face-to-face with a stinging absence. In insomnia, we crave oblivion—that escape from consciousness, which sleep appears to confer on everyone but us—and in so doing we reaffirm our uneasy relationship to the world of material necessity. Lovers, meanwhile, assert their fealty against the complete absence of any certainty about the future, as though love were a concrete thing that might be thwacked ahead of ourselves like a hockey puck to stake a claim on new ground.

      “Love like sleep requires immeasurable trust, a fall into the unknowing,” says one scholar of sleeplessness. But let’s bring the two into more intimate proximity. In insomnia we encounter the very heart of love’s darkness: the essential otherness of the beloved.