Thomas Fuller vs. Samuel Beckett

Feeling last night about as poorly as a human being can feel, having failed at every communicative outreach I tried--email, voicemail, texts, handwritten notes, face-to-face dialog--it became clear to me about midnight that I wasn't worthy of sleeping in my own bed, and so I 'made up' the couch downstairs.

I'm afraid I failed there as well. Every part of my Being got in the way of sleep, from my head to my toes and so forth. What I'd said earlier I hadn't meant to say, and what I hadn't said was all that was worth saying. I tossed and turned, or is it turned and tossed, in that strange atmosphere of neither understanding and of not being understood.

Soon the couch couldn't contain me, so I lifted up from it and tiptoed to the kitchen for a glass of water. I left one drop of water after another on my way back to the couch, thinking things through as clearly as I could, remembering the breadcrumbs that had been left by a fairy tale character in some other story, in the hopes that someone might rescue me from the miseries of my own being, as selfless as it was.

On the couch once again, sleepless still, I took up the book I'd been reading, The Classical World by Thomas Fuller, a book I published and therefore know intimately, a book that I re-read now and then for its calmative effects, A Novel of Ideas, as Fuller subtitled it, reading Fuller's account of his discovery of ancient Sicilian civilizations and almost, almost falling asleep, on the verge of sleep but not falling into sleep as reading Fuller had made me fall several times before.

Now truly miserable, failed by a writer who's served me in the past, Thomas Fuller, in a heavyweight fight with myself, wanting to sleep, knowing sleep is what I need, the only cure short of death, I arose from the couch, threw off my bedclothes and wandered among my bookshelves seeking a writer who might save me from myself. And who should I stumble upon? Samuel Beckett hiding in a corner, leaning up against a doorframe, as seen on the cover of the book, a Penguin Modern Classic, First Love and Other Novellas.

Back once more on the couch, prone, I read Beckett's "The End", all 22 pages of it and still can't fall asleep. The problem, I think, is that I really don't know what's wrong with me. If I knew what was wrong with me perhaps I could sleep.

Both Fuller and Beckett have kept me awake. At some point in the night I write in the notebook I keep for such occasions: the difference between Acceptance and Rejection to a Writer who thinks of herself or of himself as an Artist is the difference to a God between Creation and Destruction.

Samuel Beckett and Thomas Fuller side-by-side, photo by author, 2:30 a.m. November 21, 2018.