Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups

Ben Holden

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781471153785
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

There are few more precious routines than that of the bedtime story.So why do we discard this invaluable ritual as grown-ups to the detriment of our well-being and good health?
In this groundbreaking anthology, Ben Holden, editor of the bestselling Poems That Make Grown Men Cry, challenges how we think about life, a third of which is spent asleep. He deftly explores not only the science of sleep but also why we endlessly tell stories – even to ourselves, as we dream.
Holden combines his own illuminating storytelling with a treasure trove of timeless classics and contemporary gems. Poems and short stories, fairy tales and fables, reveries and nocturnes – from William Shakespeare to Haruki Murakami, Charles Dickens to Roald Dahl, Rabindranath Tagore to Nora Ephron, Vladimir Nabokov to Neil Gaiman – are all woven together to replicate the journey of a single night's sleep.
Some of today's greatest storytellers reveal their choice of the ideal grown-up bedtime story: writers such as Margaret Drabble, Ken Follett, Tessa Hadley, Robert Macfarlane, Patrick Ness, Tony Robinson and Warsan Shire.
Fold away your laptop and shut down your mobile phone. Curl up and crash out with the ultimate bedside book, one you'll return to again and again. Full of laughter and tears, moonlight and magic, Bedtime Stories for Grown-ups joyfully provides the dream way to end the day – and begin the night...

‘Evening’ softens and sings. It rolls, homeward, off the tongue – flattening out, from its yawning ‘ee’ – veering back upward – and into a round, definitive ‘ng’ finish. It heralds a levelling.

In the words of Mick Jagger, ‘It is the evening of the day’.

As the day dwindles, mellifluous milestones fleetingly pass us by: elusive magic hour or golden hour and the spellbinding witching hour; through to the downright beguiling gloaming (a Scandinavian word), twilight and, more bluntly, dusk. These are our cues, being diurnal creatures, to get in step with our circadian rhythms. Hesperus, the evening star, twinkles and heralds the transition to night and, soon enough, sleep. The day is done.

In the early twentieth century, after the First World War, ‘Eventide Homes’ sprang up, retirement homes for the elderly that were maintained by the Salvation Army. These were final destinations for those who neared the end of their pilgrimage. ‘Eventide’ evoked a comforting vanishing-point and last resort. No wonder, as evening itself ushers daily returns from workaday cares: the revenant’s melancholic homecoming, the child holding her mother’s hand on the half-lit walk home from school, the lamps twinkling alight in windows, and sundown’s mauve blush.

As the day is evened, and we return home, so journeys in time and space are embarked upon. Evening is the crepuscular creatures’ cue to come out and play: it’s vespertine time! These animals thrive on the transformative and furtive: the skunks prance; deer gambol; ocelots oscillate, their night vision sparking up; velveteen chinchillas leap out of their burrows; Strepsirrhini prod their wet noses into the air; while jaguars stalk onto the twilit turf, ready to hunt.

Eventually even evening itself drifts off and flattens out.

Night falls. As do we—

Asleep.

Time begins to pass at another, altogether different pace.

Consider the poetry of twilight.

One of contemporary poetry’s masters, Billy Collins, sets the scene (for this book, as a whole) – both in his poem I have chosen here, ‘In the Evening’, and with a selection of his own.

Evening’s poetics (and, yes, all these poems are themselves bedtime stories) here themselves drift off, diffused by nightshade.

Moonlit musings follow, in prose too, the shift reflecting that gradual but inexorable turn in time and space, onward into the darkness of night.

In the Evening

by Billy Collins

The heads of roses begin to droop.

The bee who has been hauling her gold

all day finds a hexagon in which to rest.

In the sky, traces of clouds,

the last few darting birds,

watercolors on the horizon.

The white cat sits facing a wall.

The horse in the field is asleep on its feet.

I light a candle on the wood table.

I take another sip of wine.

I pick up an onion and a knife.

And the past and the future?

Nothing but an only child with two different masks.

(2005)

★

BILLY COLLINS

A strong poem should awaken its readers by dramatizing in vivid language some crucial truth about being alive. Jane Kenyon’s poem ‘Let Evening Come’ does that. But its calm tone of resignation to the daily passing of time, which will inevitably end in the ‘evening’ of death, also relaxes us with its gently repeated advice (‘Let . . .’) and leads us finally to an affirmation of a caring God. Notice how the poem guides our attention from one delicately chosen image to the next (sunlight, barn, cricket, hoe, stars, moon, fox, bottle, scoop), each locked in its own rural, unpeopled scene, until in the last stanza, the poem dissolves into prayer. For all its wise maturity, the poem delivers a reassurance similar to that of the bedtime classic ‘Now I lay me down to sleep . . .’ Yes, go gentle into that good night, is Kenyon’s quieting advice as well as the poem’s blessing.

Let Evening Come

by Jane Kenyon

Let the light of late afternoon

shine through chinks in the barn, moving

up the bales as the sun moves down.

Let the cricket take up chafing

as a woman takes up her needles

and her yarn. Let evening come.

Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned

in long grass. Let the stars appear

and the moon disclose her silver horn.

Let the fox go back to its sandy den.

Let the wind die down. Let the shed

go black inside. Let evening come.

To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop

in the oats, to air in the lung

let evening come.

Let it come, as it will, and don’t

be afraid. God does not leave us

comfortless, so let evening come.

(1990)

Billy Collins has served two terms as US Poet Laureate and also was selected as the New York State Poet 2004–2006. He has published fourteen collections of poetry, including Aimless Love: New and Selected Poems 2003–13. He is currently a Distinguished Professor at Lehman College of the City University of New York.

★

Evening Walk

by Charles Simic

You give the appearance of listening

To my thoughts, O trees,

Bent over the road I am walking

On a late summer evening

When every one of you is a steep staircase

The night is slowly descending.

The high leaves like my mother’s lips

Forever trembling, unable to decide,

For there’s a bit of wind,

And it’s like hearing voices,

Or a mouth full of muffled laughter,

A huge dark mouth we can all fit in

Suddenly covered by a hand.

Everything quiet. Light

Of some other evening strolling ahead,

Long-ago evening of silk dresses,

Bare feet, hair unpinned and falling.

Happy heart, what heavy steps you take

As you follow after them in the shadows.

The sky at the road’s end cloudless and blue.

The night birds like children

Who won’t come to dinner.

Lost children in the darkening woods.

(1990)

★

Born in Calcutta in 1861, Rabindranath Tagore led an extraordinary life. A painter as well as a writer of plays, novels, short stories and songs, Tagore was the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. A political progressive, he was also a close friend but critic of Gandhi, and played a key role in India’s independence. The national anthems of both India and Bangladesh are Tagore compositions and his poetry also directly inspired that of Sri Lanka.

Tagore’s grander designs of social morality and nationhood permeate ‘A Single Night’. Much of the story is taken up by a man’s matter-of-fact, great expectations of his future. Yet for all his big schemes, in this old-fashioned patriarchy, pride seems bound to come before a fall. Life is happening to other people while he makes plans. By the time our protagonist notices this, a more poignant cautionary tale has emerged, complete with careful-what-you-wish-for wistfulness. Before he or we realize, life has crested onto its downward slope, and the story slides into retrospection.

’Twas ever thus! Priorities and perspectives change over time, as our emotional axes shift. It seems ironic that we humans sleep and dream less as we age, just as we have so many more experiences and regrets to dream on, and time to rest. Nevertheless, we all still find space, between the now and then, to realize in dreams, tantalizingly, our what-might-have-beens.

Sure enough, this narrator’s pining and solitude, amid the fragrant moonlight – the dreamer’s anguish – is eventually washed away by a cosmic deluge . . . during one single, extraordinary night.

A Single Night

by Rabindranath Tagore

I went to school with Surabala, and we played ‘getting married’ games together. Surabala’s mother was very affectionate towards me whenever I went to their house. Seeing us as a pair, she would murmur to herself, ‘They’re meant for each other!’ I was young, but I understood her drift fairly well. The feeling that I had a greater than normal claim to Surabala fixed itself in my mind. I became so puffed up with this feeling that I tended to boss her about. She meekly obeyed all my orders and endured my punishments. She was praised in the neighbourhood for her beauty, but beauty meant nothing to my barbarous young eyes: I merely knew that Surabala had been born to acknowledge my lordship over her – hence my inconsiderate behaviour.

My father was the chief rent-collector on the Chaudhuris’ estate. His hope was that he would train me in estate-management when I was grown up, and find me a job as a land-agent somewhere. But I didn’t like that idea at all. My ambitions were as high as our neighbour’s son Nilratan’s, who ran away to Calcutta to study and had become chief clerk to a Collector. Even if I didn’t become that, I was determined to be at least Head Clerk in a magistrate’s court. I had always noticed how respectful my father was towards legal officers of that kind. I had known since childhood that it was necessary, on various occasions, to make offerings to them of fish, vegetables and money; so I gave a specially privileged position in my heart to court employees, even to the peons. They were the most venerated of Bengal’s deities, new miniature editions of her millions of gods. In pursuing prosperity, people placed greater trust in them than in bountiful Ganesh himself – so all the tribute that Ganesh formerly received now went to them.

Inspired by Nilratan’s example, I also took my chance to run away to Calcutta. First I stayed with an acquaintance from my home village; later my father began to give me some help towards my education. My studies proceeded along conventional lines.

In addition, I attended meetings and assemblies. I had no doubt that it would soon become necessary for me to lay down my life for my country. But I had no idea how to accomplish so momentous an act, and no one to look to for an example. I was not, however, short of enthusiasm. We were village-boys, and had not learnt to ridicule everything like the smart boys of Calcutta; so our zeal was unshakeable. The leaders at our meetings gave speeches, but we used to wander about from house to house in the heat of the day, without lunch, begging for subscriptions; or we stood by the roadside giving out handbills; or we arranged benches and chairs before meetings. We were ready to roll up our sleeves and fight at the slightest word against our leaders. But to the smart boys of Calcutta, all this merely demonstrated our rural naïvety.

I had come to qualify myself to be a Head Clerk or Superintendent; but I was actually preparing to become Mazzini or Garibaldi. Meanwhile my father and Surabala’s father agreed that I should be married to her. I had run away to Calcutta at the age of fifteen, when Surabala was eight; now I was eighteen. In my father’s opinion my marriageable age was elapsing. But I vowed I would never marry: I would die for my country instead. I told my father I would not marry until my studies were completely finished.

Two or three months later I heard that Surabala had been married to the lawyer Ramlochan Babu. I was busy collecting subscriptions for down-trodden India, so I attached no importance to the news.

I passed into college, and was about to take my second-year exams when news came of my father’s death. I was not the only one in the family – I had my mother and two sisters. So I had to leave college and search for work. With great difficulty I managed to get a post as assistant master in a secondary school in a small town in Naukhali District. I told myself I had found the right sort of work. My guidance and encouragement would raise each pupil to be a leader of the new India.

I started work. I found that the coming exam was much more demanding than the new India. The headmaster objected if I breathed a single word to the pupils outside Grammar and Algebra. In a couple of months my enthusiasm had faded away. I became one of those dull individuals who sits and broods when he is at home; who, when working, shoulders his plough with his head bowed, whipped from behind, meekly breaking up earth; content at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Introduction: Seize the Night
• 1. Eventide
• 2. Once Upon a Time
• 3. Hook, Line and Sinker
• 4. The Dead Spot
• 5. Be Not Afeard
• 6. Tread Softly
• 7. Ashore
• Afterword by Diana Athill
• Notes and Illuminations
• Author Biographies
• Further Reading
• About Readathon
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• Copyrights and Credits
• Copyright