A Night’s Sleep

Since childhood, novelist Vincenzo Latronico (Perfection), has been beset by terminal insomnia—the kind that kicks in to interrupt his sleep cycle. He can fall asleep no problem, but he’s also more familiar with 4:00 a.m. than most people who don’t work a graveyard shift. For The Yale Review, he muses on the specific breed of torment that lurks at the end, but manages to color the extent of his days.

If insomnia has no source, nothing can be done to overcome it. And so it falls out of the causal reasoning we use to make sense of the world. At the beginning of what would be my longest bout of poor sleep so far—2011 to 2015—I tried moving apartments; I tried avoiding screens after dinner; I tried exercising in the morning, or in the evening, or both; I tried a punishing Norwegian meditation regimen; I tried a sleep monitor, whose consistently poor readings undermined even those mornings when I woke up feeling mildly rested; I tried esoteric diets, and spent my mornings groggily jogging along Berlin’s Landwehrkanal, hallucinations of croissants before me. Nothing worked. My insomnia had no cause but its effects were everywhere, which is one of Aristotle’s definitions of God.