Sancrucensis

Jerome K. Jerome and S.

Bernard on Sleep
AUGUST 31, 2010SEPTEMBER 22, 2014 / EDMUND
WALDSTEIN, O.CIST. /

(https://sancrucensis.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/threemeninboatto00jeroiala_0068.jpg)

No Novel has made me laugh so much as Jerome K. Jerome’s

Three Men in a Boat
(http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/308/pg308.html). The
humor of Three Men in a Boat is remarkably universal. Comic
writing is often the most time-bound and least universal sort of
writing. The ridiculous has to do with the concrete; it is bound up
with the fact that material. Man’s immortal soul is the form of an
immortal body, and he is thus caught up in all the imperfections
of matter. Much comic writing turns on the circumstances of
embodied human life, the vagaries of culture; it tends to be full of
references to particular events, politicians etc. This is what makes
Aristophanes so obscure. There is a certain amount of such humor
in Three Men in a Boat, but that is not its main mode of humor.
What makes Three Men in a Boat so much funnier than its sequel,
Three Men on the Bummel, is that the latter is so much more
particular, fueled primarily by concrete contrasts between
Victorian England and Wilhelmine Germany. Three Men in a Boat
on the other hand is fueled by the absurdities of the human
condition an sich. The contrasts that it thrives on are the contrasts
inherent in human life itself, the contrasts between matter and
spirit, between eternal destiny and dependence on the trivial.

There is something very Pascalian about Jerome K. Jerome’s

sensitivity to the contrasts of the human condition. It is not just a
sensitivity to the absurdity of embodied spirit; it is a sensitivity to
the fallenness of the world, to original sin, or, as J.K.J. calls it, “the
natural cussedness of things in general.”

Perhaps the most Pascalian scene in Three Men in a Boat is on the

morning of the day that the three men set out. Jerome and Harris
wake up late and snarl bad-temperedly at each other till they see
that George is still asleep:

There he lay – the man who had wanted to know what time he
should wake us – on his back, with his mouth wide open, and
his knees stuck up.

I don’t know why it should be, I am sure; but the sight of

another man asleep in bed when I am up, maddens me. It
seems to me so shocking to see the precious hours of a man’s
life – the priceless moments that will never come back to him
again – being wasted in mere brutish sleep.

There was George, throwing away in hideous sloth the

inestimable gift of time; his valuable life, every second of
which he would have to account for hereafter, passing away
from him, unused. He might have been up stuffing himself
with eggs and bacon, irritating the dog, or flirting with the
slavey, instead of sprawling there, sunk in soul-clogging
oblivion.

It was a terrible thought. Harris and I appeared to be struck by

it at the same instant. We determined to save him, and, in this
noble resolve, our own dispute was forgotten. We flew across
and slung the clothes off him, and Harris landed him one with
a slipper, and I shouted in his ear, and he awoke.

The Pascalian element is of course the brilliant juxtaposition of

eternal destiny with the habit of diversion. Jerome and Harris
cannot propose any alternative to the soul-clogging oblivion of
sleep except the waking sleep of diversion.
 I have discovered [Pascal writes
(http://www.gutenberg.org/files/18269/18269-h/18269-
h.htm)] that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single
fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber. A
man who has enough to live on, if he knew how to stay with
pleasure at home, would not leave it to go to sea or to besiege
a town. [… ] When, after finding the cause of all our ills, I have
sought to discover the reason of it, I have found that there is
one very real reason, namely, the natural poverty of our feeble
and mortal condition, so miserable that nothing can comfort
us when we think of it closely.

I have often thought that Pascal here gives us the key to

understanding the monastic life. The monastic life consists in
sitting still in one’s own chamber, in facing the misery of the
human condition squarely, weeping over it, and watching and
waiting eagerly for the coming of the master who frees us from it.
Woe to the servant whom the master finds sleeping when he
comes!

(https://sancrucensis.files.wordpress.com/2010/08/bernard_of_clairvaux__gutenburg__13206.jpg)In
his part of the Vita Prima William of St. Thierry writes (n.21)
(http://www.binetti.ru/bernardus/171.shtml) about S. Bernard’s
scorn for sleep (rough translation):

What should I say of sleep, which in other men is a restoration

after labor, a recreation of sense and mind? From that time till
now he was awake more than is humanly possible. For no
time did he regard as so wasted as the time of sleep. He held
the comparison of sleep and death for very fitting; for as the
sleeping seem dead to men, so the dead are sleeping in the
eyes of God. Hence he could scarce keep his patience when he
saw a religious in sleep who either snored too loud, or
sprawled indecently; he thought such a one a carnal or
worldly sleeper. The meagerness of his sleep was
proportionate to the meagerness of his food; in neither did he
indulge his body to satiety, in both he was satisfied if he had
any at all. As for night-watches, he considered a watch
moderate if he did not spend the whole night sleepless.
At the rare times when he slept he could truly make the words of
the bride his own, “I slept but my heart was awake.” (Sg 5:2)

The Dove, The Opalescent Parrot, Theology

BERNARD , CITEAUX , CLAIRVAUX ,
ENGLAND , JEROME K. JEROME ,
LITERATURE , MONASTIC , PASCAL ,
RIDICULOUS , SENSIBLE WORLD , WILLIAM OF
ST. THIERRY

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and S. Bernard on Sleep”

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