A Child's Garden of Verses (1885) is Robert Louis Stevenson's book of poems spoken in a child's voice: rising by yellow candle-light in winter, watching rain fall on field and sea, playing at pirates, noticing a shadow, and blessing the world's abundance in the two lines of Happy Thought. Written while Stevenson often lived under the discipline of illness, the poems remember gardens, nurseries, and indoor days with affection rather than irony.
Medical tag
Sleep Insomnia
Sleeplessness, sleepwalking, sleep as cure or torment.
Works
A Little Princess opens on a foggy London day as seven-year-old Sara Crewe rides in a cab with her adoring father, Captain Ralph Crewe, a young officer who has brought her from India to Miss Minchin's Select Seminary for Young Ladies. Because her father is rich, Sara is given a private sitting room, a French maid, a pony and a doll named Emily whom she half believes can walk and talk when no one is looking.
A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in Athens with a legal crisis: Egeus demands that Hermia marry Demetrius, while Hermia loves Lysander and faces punishment under Theseus's law. The lovers flee into the wood, followed by Demetrius and Helena, and the play transfers civic conflict into a night world governed by Oberon, Titania, Puck, and the flower whose juice alters desire.
Bedtime for Frances is a picture book about a little badger who cannot settle down for the night. At seven o'clock Mother and Father tell Frances it is bedtime, and she begins a string of requests: a glass of milk, a piggyback ride to her room, a kiss from each parent, her teddy bear and her doll, and then another round of kisses.
Subtitled 'Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future', Beyond Good and Evil was Nietzsche's attempt to restate in plain argumentative prose, divided into 296 numbered sections and a closing poem, the ideas that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had put in prophetic form. The preface opens by supposing that truth is a woman and that dogmatic philosophers, with their clumsy seriousness, have never known how to win her.
Carmilla is a Gothic vampire novella narrated by Laura, the nineteen-year-old daughter of an Englishman who retired from the Austrian service and bought a lonely castle in the forests of Styria. A brief prologue presents the story as a case from the papers of the physician Doctor Hesselius and notes that its narrator has since died.
Sallust wrote two short monographs on episodes of the late Roman Republic, each opened by a philosophical preface and each meant to show how ambition and greed were corrupting the state. The library text is the Rev. John Selby Watson's literal English version, with his argument (chapter outline) before each work and his explanatory notes after it.
Ceremony follows Tayo, a young man of mixed Laguna and white ancestry, who returns to the Laguna Pueblo reservation in New Mexico after the Second World War deeply ill in body and mind. In the Philippines he fought alongside his cousin Rocky, the family's favoured son, and endured the Bataan Death March; Rocky died of his wounds during the march, and Tayo could not save him.
Parker's Complete Poems gathers the light verse that made her one of the best-selling poets of the 1920s and 1930s. The core of the volume is her three collections, Enough Rope (1926), Sunset Gun (1928) and Death and Taxes (1931), which were combined in Not So Deep as a Well (1936), together with uncollected and early verse published in magazines from the 1910s onward.
Rousseau's Confessions is the founding text of modern autobiography. It promises to show 'a man in all the integrity of nature', the author himself, concealing nothing.
Cuchulain of Muirthemne is Lady Gregory's arrangement of the Ulster Cycle, the oldest group of Irish heroic tales, told in the English of the Kiltartan countryside in County Galway, with its Irish turns of phrase such as 'it is what he said'. Working from medieval Irish texts and the editions and translations of nineteenth-century scholars, she joined the separate tales into a single life of the hero Cuchulain, leaving out what she thought her readers would not care for and adding little of her own.
De Materia Medica is an ancient pharmacopoeia: a systematic guide to plants, animals, minerals, wines, oils and manufactured preparations used as medicines. Dioscorides does not write a narrative.
Death in Venice follows the last weeks of Gustav von Aschenbach, a celebrated German writer in his fifties, ennobled on his fiftieth birthday, whose prose epic on Frederick the Great and other works have made him a model of disciplined art. Thomas Mann published the novella in 1912, and it is told in five chapters by a narrator who comments on Aschenbach with a mixture of sympathy and irony.
The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha was published in two parts, in 1605 and 1615. An impoverished hidalgo of about fifty, Alonso Quixano, reads chivalric romances until, from too little sleep and too much reading, his brain dries up and he loses his wits.
Dracula is told through journals, letters, phonograph diaries, telegrams and newspaper cuttings assembled by its characters. Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, travels to Transylvania to arrange the purchase of a London property, Carfax, for Count Dracula.
Early Christian Lives gathers late antique biographies of saints, monks and holy figures, often including Athanasius’ Life of Antony and Jerome’s lives of Paul, Hilarion and Malchus. These works do not present biography as neutral chronology.
Montaigne called his pieces essais, 'trials' or 'attempts', and the word names both a method and a new literary genre. The book gathers 107 chapters in three books, ranging from one-page notes on thumbs, smells and names to the sprawling 'Apology for Raymond Sebond', which fills a sixth of the whole.
Fahrenheit 451 is set in an American city of an unspecified future where houses are fireproof and firemen no longer put out fires but start them, burning books and the houses of people who hide them. Guy Montag, a fireman of ten years, loves the work.
Heraclitus's book does not survive; what remains are roughly 130 short sayings preserved as quotations by later authors such as Plato, Aristotle, Plutarch, Sextus Empiricus, Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus and Diogenes Laertius. Modern editions number them according to Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz (DK), and the reference edition presents them in a fresh translation with commentary.
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a frame narrative told through the letters of Robert Walton, an English explorer whose ship is trapped in Arctic ice. Walton rescues a dying stranger, Victor Frankenstein, who has been pursuing a gigantic figure across the frozen sea, and who tells his story as a warning to a man whose ambition resembles his own.
Henry IV, Part 1 shows King Henry IV, who took the crown from Richard II, troubled by rebellion and by his own son. In Act I the king, hoping to lead a crusade to atone for Richard's fall, hears instead of war on the Welsh and Scottish borders, and envies the Earl of Northumberland his son Harry Percy, called Hotspur, who has won a victory at Holmedon, while his own heir, Prince Hal, wastes his days in the taverns of Eastcheap with the fat old knight Sir John Falstaff.
The Heroides (Heroines) is a collection of twenty-one verse letters in elegiac couplets, written as if by women of myth and legend to the men who have left, betrayed or endangered them, together with three pairs of letters exchanged between lovers. Ovid claimed to have invented the form.
Death, be not proud is one of John Donne's Holy Sonnets, a group of religious sonnets probably written around 1609-1610, circulated in manuscript among friends and printed only after his death in the Poems of 1633. In Herbert Grierson's 1912 edition, followed here, it is Holy Sonnet X; the numbering differs among manuscripts and early printings.
This volume completes the library's surviving plays of Euripides with eleven works in Edward P. Coleridge's prose translation of 1891. Iphigenia in Aulis, produced after the poet's death in 405 BC, opens at night on the shore of Aulis, where the Greek fleet is held back by windless weather.
Ivanhoe is set in England in 1194, when King Richard the Lion-Hearted is making his way home in secret after captivity in Austria and his brother Prince John is scheming to take the crown. More than a century after the Norman Conquest, Saxons and Normans are still bitterly divided.
Julius Caesar, Shakespeare's tragedy of the assassination of 44 BC, begins as Rome celebrates Caesar's triumph over the sons of Pompey. The tribunes rebuke the fickle crowd, a soothsayer warns Caesar to beware the Ides of March, and Caesar is offered a crown three times by Mark Antony and refuses it, then falls in a fit of the falling sickness.
The Laws is Plato's last and longest dialogue, twelve books of conversation in which three elderly men design the constitution and legal code of a new city. On a midsummer day an unnamed Athenian Stranger walks from Knossos toward the cave and shrine of Zeus with Cleinias, a Cretan, and Megillus, a Spartan.
Legends of Charlemagne, or Romance of the Middle Ages, is the third of Thomas Bulfinch's books of legend, published in 1863. It retells in English prose the romances that grew up around Charlemagne and his twelve peers, or paladins, chiefly as the Italian Renaissance poets Luigi Pulci, Matteo Maria Boiardo and Ludovico Ariosto shaped them.
Letters and Papers from Prison was assembled after the war by Eberhard Bethge, Bonhoeffer's closest friend, former student and nephew by marriage, and published in 1951 as Widerstand und Ergebung ('Resistance and Submission'). It gathers what Bonhoeffer wrote during two years of imprisonment by the Nazi state, together with the essay 'After Ten Years', composed at Christmas 1942 as a stocktaking for fellow conspirators.
Letters from a Stoic selects from Seneca’s Moral Letters to Lucilius, a sequence of philosophical letters that turn daily life into training for freedom. Seneca writes as an older adviser to a younger friend, but the letters are also exercises for himself.
Macbeth opens on a Scottish heath where three witches plan to meet Macbeth. Returning from victory over rebels and Norwegian invaders, Macbeth and his fellow general Banquo meet the witches, who hail Macbeth as Thane of Glamis, Thane of Cawdor and future king, and tell Banquo that his descendants will be kings.
The Meditations, which Marcus Aurelius may have titled simply 'To Himself', is a private notebook of philosophical reflections written in Greek, probably during his military campaigns on the Danube in the 170s CE. It was not intended for publication and consists of twelve books of entries ranging from single sentences to short essays, often repeated and varied as exercises to fix principles in the mind.
Mourning Becomes Electra is a trilogy of plays that moves Aeschylus's Oresteia to a New England seaport town in 1865-1866, at the end of the American Civil War. The Greek house of Atreus becomes the Mannons, a proud Puritan family of shipowners and judges whose white-columned mansion, built like a Greek temple, stands apart from the town.
Natural History: A Selection introduces one of antiquity’s great encyclopedic minds. Pliny wants to collect nature and human use together: stars, lands, peoples, animals, plants, metals, pigments, stones, medicines, marvels and technologies all belong to one vast inventory.
The Novum Organum ('new instrument') is the second and only substantially completed part of Bacon's projected Instauratio Magna, a six-part plan to rebuild human knowledge from its foundations. Its title throws down a challenge to the Organon, the collection of Aristotle's logical works that had governed university teaching for centuries.
On the Road is narrated by Sal Paradise, a young writer living with his aunt in New Jersey, and records a series of journeys back and forth across the United States and into Mexico between 1947 and 1950. The engine of the book is Dean Moriarty, a fast-talking, car-stealing, endlessly restless young man from Denver who seems to Sal the embodiment of a wild, joyous American energy.
Orlando is a comic, fantastical biography of an English nobleman and poet who lives from the last years of Elizabeth I to the eleventh of October 1928, ageing only about twenty years and becoming a woman along the way. The book opens with the sixteen-year-old Orlando slashing at a Moor's head in the attic of his family's enormous house in the country.
Othello is the tragedy of a Moorish general in the service of Venice who is brought, step by step, to murder the wife who loves him. The play opens at night in a Venetian street, where the ensign Iago, furious that Othello has promoted the Florentine Michael Cassio over him, rouses the senator Brabantio with crude news that his daughter Desdemona has eloped with the Moor.
Richard III follows Richard, Duke of Gloucester, youngest brother of the Yorkist King Edward IV, from his first soliloquy to his death at Bosworth Field in 1485. The Wars of the Roses are over and peace has come, but Richard, born misshapen and unfit for courtship, tells the audience he has determined to prove a villain and win the crown.
Maupassant's stories, written mostly between 1880 and 1890, are compact, ironic and often brutal studies of French life: Norman peasants, Parisian clerks, prostitutes, bourgeois families, soldiers and the provincial gentry. This selection gathers many of the best known, which typically include the following.
Sense and Sensibility follows two sisters whose temperaments represent the opposed values of its title. When Henry Dashwood dies, Norland Park in Sussex passes to John, his son by a first marriage, who promises to provide for his stepmother and half-sisters but is talked out of any real generosity by his grasping wife Fanny.
Siddhartha is a short, lyrical novel set in India in the time of the Buddha, following the spiritual journey of a young man who seeks enlightenment through experience rather than doctrine. Siddhartha is the handsome, gifted son of a Brahmin, admired by all and loved by his friend Govinda.
Mr. Utterson, a reserved and loyal London lawyer, takes his Sunday walk with his kinsman Richard Enfield, who points out a shabby door in a by-street and tells how, at three one winter morning, he saw a small man trample a little girl and walk on. Caught and threatened, the man paid close to a hundred pounds in compensation with a cheque signed by a respected gentleman.
The Summa Theologiae, traditionally called the Summa Theologica, is Aquinas's unfinished synthesis of Christian theology, written, as its prologue says, for beginners who were confused by the disorder and repetition of existing textbooks. It contains some 512 questions divided into about 2,600 articles, each built on the same disciplined form inherited from university disputation.
Swann's Way (Du côté de chez Swann) is the first volume of Marcel Proust's seven-part novel In Search of Lost Time, which C. K. Scott Moncrieff translated under the title Remembrance of Things Past. Grasset issued it at Proust's expense in November 1913.
Tales from Shakespeare retells twenty of Shakespeare's plays as prose stories for children. A short preface explains the method: the authors keep Shakespeare's own words wherever they can, avoid words that came into English after his time, and hope the tales will send young readers on to the plays themselves when they are older.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a comic and nostalgic novel of boyhood set in the 1840s in St. Petersburg, a small Missouri town on the Mississippi modelled on Twain's Hannibal. Tom is an orphan living with his kind, anxious Aunt Polly, his priggish half-brother Sid and his cousin Mary.
The Age of Fable, or Stories of Gods and Heroes, is Thomas Bulfinch's prose retelling of Greek and Roman mythology, with shorter chapters on Egyptian, Eastern, Norse and Celtic belief, first published in Boston in 1855. Bulfinch, a bank clerk with a Harvard classical education, wrote it so that ordinary readers could understand the mythological allusions in English poetry and speech.
The Anatomy of Melancholy presents itself as a medical treatise, laid out in the scholastic manner of partitions, sections, members and subsections, on 'what it is, with all the kinds, causes, symptoms, prognostics, and several cures of it'. It is also an encyclopedia of Renaissance learning, a compendium of quotation from more than a thousand authors, a satire on human folly, and a consolation for its author and readers.
The Argonautica is the one full Greek epic of the voyage of the Argo that survives from antiquity, composed in four books of dactylic hexameter by the Alexandrian scholar-poet Apollonius of Rhodes in the third century BC. King Pelias of Iolcus, warned by an oracle to beware a man wearing one sandal, sees Jason arrive having lost a sandal in the river Anaurus, and sends him to fetch the golden fleece from Colchis at the far end of the Black Sea.
The Bhagavad Gita is a dialogue of seven hundred verses in eighteen chapters, forming part of the sixth book of the Mahabharata, the great Sanskrit epic of the war between two branches of a royal family, the Pandavas and the Kauravas. It is set on the battlefield of Kurukshetra at the moment before battle begins.
The Blue Fairy Book (1889), edited by Andrew Lang, gathers European fairy tales into one household volume that became the first of the famous colored fairy books. Lang and his collaborators retell stories from Perrault, the Brothers Grimm, Madame d’Aulnoy, and other streams so that children meet Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin, and many less anthologized tales in a single readable English.
The Canon of Medicine (al-Qanun fi al-Tibb) is Ibn Sina's encyclopedia of medicine in five books, and Book I, the subject of this record, sets out the general principles on which the rest depends. It opens with a definition: medicine is the science of the states of the human body in health and when not in health, and of how health is lost and restored, with a theoretical part that gives knowledge and a practical part that guides the physician's judgment.
The Comedy of Errors takes place in a single day in the Greek city of Ephesus, where two sets of identical twins, separated as babies, are mistaken for each other until the whole town seems bewitched. Egeon, an old merchant of Syracuse, has been arrested because the two cities are at war and any Syracusan found in Ephesus must pay a thousand marks or die.
The Conquest of Gaul is a common English title for Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, seven books narrating his campaigns of 58 to 52 BCE, completed by an eighth book written after his death by his officer Aulus Hirtius. Each book covers one campaigning year, and Caesar speaks of himself throughout in the third person, a device that makes political self-advertisement read like a dispatch.
The Consolation of Philosophy is a prison dialogue between the condemned Boethius and Lady Philosophy, who appears at his bedside when he is sick with grief and self-pity. The work alternates prose and metre.
The Epic of Gilgamesh is the great poem of ancient Mesopotamia, known in its fullest form from the standard Babylonian version on clay tablets, many of them from the library of the Assyrian king Ashurbanipal at Nineveh. The library holds no text of it: the public-domain English versions, by Stephen Langdon (1917), Morris Jastrow and Albert T. Clay (1920) and R. Campbell Thompson (1928), are fragmentary scholarly editions of a poem still being recovered, so this record describes the epic without quoting it.
The Gay Science, also translated as The Joyful Wisdom, is Nietzsche's book of convalescence, experiment, and dangerous cheerfulness. Its aphorisms and songs range across knowledge, art, women, morality, religion, science, friendship, self-creation, health, and style.
The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation is Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's history of the Soviet system of prisons, labour camps and exile, which he likened to an archipelago of islands scattered across the country, visible only to those taken there. Written in secret between 1958 and 1968, it draws on Solzhenitsyn's own eight years as a prisoner and on the testimony of some two hundred and twenty-seven other former prisoners, together with published Soviet sources.
Die Traumdeutung appeared in November 1899 with the date 1900 on its title page, and Freud regarded it as his most important book. Its central claim is that dreams are meaningful psychic acts that can be interpreted, and that every dream, properly analysed, proves to be the fulfilment of a wish.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is James Boswell's account of the poet, essayist, critic and lexicographer Samuel Johnson (1709-1784), arranged year by year and built largely from conversations Boswell wrote down over twenty-one years of friendship. It opens with Johnson's birth in Lichfield, the son of a bookseller, his childhood scrofula, for which his mother took him to London to be touched by Queen Anne, and his schooling.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria gathers Janet's Harvard lectures into a clear account of dissociation, narrowed consciousness, fixed ideas, amnesia, anesthesia, motor symptoms, crises, and suggestibility. Janet stands close to Charcot but less theatrical; he is interested in how psychological functions fall apart, become dissociated, or continue automatically outside ordinary awareness.
Captain Arthur Hastings, invalided home from the Western Front in 1916, meets his old friend John Cavendish and is invited to Styles Court, the Cavendish family's country house in Essex. The house belongs for her lifetime to John's stepmother, the generous and domineering Emily Inglethorp, who has recently married Alfred Inglethorp, a bearded man about twenty years younger whom the family suspect of wanting her money.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket begins as a sea adventure told by a young Nantucketer whose craving for forbidden experience repeatedly overrides judgment. Pym and his friend Augustus Barnard first make a disastrous drunken voyage in the Ariel, a small boat nearly destroyed before rescue.
Mary Rowlandson's narrative tells of the eleven weeks and five days she spent as a captive during King Philip's War, the conflict of 1675-1676 between the New England colonies and an alliance of Wampanoag, Narragansett, Nipmuc and other Native peoples led in part by the Wampanoag sachem Metacom, whom the English called King Philip. It opens on 10 February 1675, by the Old Style calendar then used in English New England (20 February 1676 in modern reckoning), when a large war party attacks Lancaster, Massachusetts.
The Odyssey tells the story of Odysseus's long return from Troy to Ithaca and of the household that must survive his absence. The poem opens not with Odysseus but with disorder: his son Telemachus is growing up under the pressure of suitors who consume the estate and demand that Penelope choose a new husband.
The Persian Expedition, known in Greek as the Anabasis or 'march up-country', is Xenophon's account of the campaign of 401–399 BCE in which about ten thousand Greek mercenaries followed Cyrus the Younger into Mesopotamia and then fought their way home. Cyrus, younger son of Darius II, gathers an army in Sardis on the pretext of a war against Pisidian raiders, while his real aim is to unseat his brother, King Artaxerxes II.
The Princess and Curdie is George MacDonald's sequel to The Princess and the Goblin, set about a year after the goblins were defeated. Curdie, the miner's son, now nearly thirteen, has grown dull and doubtful; he half believes that Princess Irene's great-great-grandmother was only a child's dream.
The Ramayana, the story of Rama's journey, is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India, attributed to the sage Valmiki and composed in the sloka couplet. It opens with a frame: Valmiki asks the sage Narada whether any man on earth is perfectly virtuous, hears the life of Rama, and, moved to pity when a fowler shoots one of a pair of curlews, utters the first sloka; the god Brahma then bids him tell the whole tale.
The Raven is a narrative poem of eighteen six-line stanzas in which a grieving student, alone at midnight in December, is visited by a talking bird that can say only one word. It appeared in the New York Evening Mirror on 29 January 1845, ahead of its printing in The American Review, and made Poe famous almost overnight.
The Rule of St Benedict is a concise manual for forming a stable monastic community. It opens by calling the monastery a school for the Lord’s service and asks what kind of person desires life.
The Sketch Book is a miscellany of essays, travel sketches and tales presented as the notebook of Geoffrey Crayon, a genial American bachelor who crosses the Atlantic to look at the England he has known from books. Crayon opens by explaining that he wanders to see the shifting scenes of life, then describes the voyage itself, a visit to the Liverpool historian William Roscoe, and a portrait of a wife who sustains her ruined husband.
The Story of My Boyhood and Youth is John Muir's account of his first twenty-five years, from a Scottish seaside town to the edge of what he calls the University of the Wilderness. In the first chapter he remembers Dunbar on the stormy North Sea coast: rambles with his grandfather David Gilrye, who taught him his letters from shop signs, scrambles over the ruins of Dunbar Castle, fights and dares with schoolmates, the servant girls' terrifying tales of the Dandy Doctors who were said to steal children for the Edinburgh dissecting rooms, and a school where Mr. Lyon and his father together drilled grammar and Bible verses into him by memory and the rod.
The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play. In the Induction, the drunken tinker Christopher Sly is thrown out of an alehouse and falls asleep on the heath.
The Tempest opens with a ship breaking apart in a storm off a remote island. On shore, the magician Prospero tells his fifteen-year-old daughter Miranda that he was once Duke of Milan.
Dorothy lives on the grey Kansas prairie with her Uncle Henry, her Aunt Em and her little black dog Toto. When a cyclone strikes, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry reach the cellar, but Dorothy runs back for Toto, and the house is carried away with the two of them inside.
Hesiod's two complete poems are the oldest Greek attempts to explain, in verse, where the gods came from and how a man ought to live under them. Both are in dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homer, and both begin with the Muses.
Through the Looking-Glass is the sequel to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. On a snowy afternoon, the day before a bonfire she hopes to see, Alice sits by the fire scolding her black kitten, wonders what the room behind the drawing-room mirror is like, climbs onto the mantelpiece and passes through the glass.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None is a philosophical prose-poem in four parts, written in the cadences of Luther's Bible. Its hero borrows the name of the ancient Persian prophet Zoroaster, whom Nietzsche chose because the first moralist should be the one to overturn morality.
Troilus and Criseyde retells a story from the Trojan War tradition, but its real subject is erotic psychology under the pressure of fortune, language and time. Troilus, a Trojan prince and son of Priam, initially mocks lovers until he sees Criseyde in the temple and is struck by desire.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair is a lyric sequence of erotic longing, memory, landscape and loss. The poems do not tell a plot, but they trace an emotional arc from sensual address to abandonment and despair.
Up from Slavery is Booker T. Washington's account of his rise from a slave cabin in Virginia to the leadership of Tuskegee Institute. He begins with what he does not know: the exact date of his birth, about 1858 or 1859 as he gives it, and the name of his white father.
Lucy Snowe tells her own story, years after the events, in a reserved voice that often withholds what she feels and sometimes what she knows. As a girl she stays with her godmother Mrs. Bretton in the old town of Bretton, where she watches the tiny, intense Paulina Home attach herself to Mrs. Bretton's teenage son Graham.
Waiting for Godot is a play in two acts by Samuel Beckett, written in French as En attendant Godot between late 1948 and early 1949, published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1952, and first staged at the small Théâtre de Babylone in Paris on 5 January 1953, directed by Roger Blin. Beckett's own English translation, subtitled a tragicomedy in two acts, was published by Grove Press in New York in 1954.
White Nights is narrated by an unnamed young dreamer in St. Petersburg, a lonely man who lives more intensely in imagination than in social life. During the luminous northern nights, he wanders the city and feels intimate with streets, houses and imagined lives while remaining isolated from actual human companionship.
Passages
- A Child's Garden of Verses, Bed in Summer
Daylight bedtime suggests regulated rest for a delicate child.
- A Little Princess, Chapter 12, The Other Side of the Wall
Carrisford and Carmichael recall Carrisford's flight, sleeplessness, delirium and hospital confinement with brain fever.
- A Midsummer Night's Dream, The wedding play
A Midsummer Night's Dream gives this tag concrete force through the medical lens is early modern psychology: love-melancholy, altered perception, sleep, dreams, and the boundary between enchantment and madness
- Bedtime for Frances, Bedtime requests
Frances's chain of requests for milk, piggyback, kisses, bear and doll before she will lie down.
- Bedtime for Frances, Tiger, giant, crack and curtains
Successive night fears, each answered by Father, ending in his explanation that everyone has a job.
- Beyond Good and Evil, Part Four, §§68, 154, 156, 157
Memory yielding to pride; health versus pathology of thought; collective insanity; the thought of suicide as consolation through bad nights.
- Carmilla, Chapter VII, Descending
Laura describes weeks of lassitude, languor, melancholy and pallor, and a gentle, not unwelcome sense of slowly sinking toward death.
- Catiline's War and The Jugurthine War, Catiline's War, ch. XV
Catiline's guilty conscience: no rest waking or sleeping, pale complexion, haggard eyes, irregular gait.
- Ceremony, Opening section
Tayo's sleeplessness, nausea and flood of memories; his recollection of the VA hospital ward where he felt himself invisible.
- Complete Poems, 'Symptom Recital' (Sunset Gun or Death and Taxes)
A list of complaints of mood, sleep and temper presented as symptoms, revealed as signs of falling in love.
- Complete Poems, Various poems across the collections
Drinking, hangovers and night-time wakefulness as part of the speaker's romantic misery.
- Confessions, Book VI
The attack of pounding arteries and tinnitus with permanent partial deafness; insomnia; 'the vapors'; reading anatomy and imagining a polyp of the heart; the journey to the physicians of Montpellier and their waters and whey.
- Cuchulain of Muirthemne, The War for the Bull of Cuailgne (Lugh's watch at the Lerga)
Exhausted after fighting since Samhain with only brief rests on his spear, Cuchulain sleeps three days and nights while Lugh heals his wounds with Druid herbs.
- De Materia Medica, Book 4, poppy/opium entries
Poppy juice and opium preparations are described as powerful pain-relieving and sleep-inducing substances with lethal risk.
- Death in Venice, Chapter I
Aschenbach, unable to rest after a morning's work and missing his midday sleep, walks out and experiences a hallucination-like vision of a tropical swamp.
- Don Quixote, Part I, Ch. 1
Little sleep and much reading dry Alonso Quixano's brain until he loses his wits.
- Dracula, Ch. 8 (Seward's diary)
Sleepless and dejected, Seward considers taking chloral hydrate and resolves not to let it become a habit.
- Dracula, Ch. 6–8 (Mina's journal)
Lucy's sleepwalking in Whitby and the night Mina finds her on the churchyard bench.
- Essays, Book III, Ch. XIII, 'Of Experience'
Detailed personal regimen (sleep, diet, habits) and colic attacks, with the argument that long experience of one's own body outranks medical rules.
- Fahrenheit 451, Part One, the night Montag meets Clarisse
Montag finds Mildred unconscious beside an empty bottle of sleeping tablets; the technicians pump her stomach and replace her blood by machine.
- Fragments, DK 21, 26, 75, 89
Fragments on sleep, death and waking; sleepers each turn into a private world.
- Frankenstein, Vol. I, Ch. III (1818) / Ch. 4 (1831)
Studies in anatomy and decay; gathering materials from charnel houses, dissecting rooms and slaughterhouses; secretive, sleepless labour that damages his health.
- Henry IV, Part 1, Act 2, Scene 3
Lady Percy describes Hotspur's lost appetite and sleep, his starting, sweating and murmuring of battles in his dreams.
- Heroides, Letter VII (Dido to Aeneas)
Dido, sleepless and consumed by love, prepares the pyre and writes her own epitaph.
- Holy Sonnet X: "Death, be not proud", Lines 5-6
Rest and sleep are called death's pictures, the classical analogy of sleep and death on which the argument turns.
- Iphigenia in Aulis and Other Plays, Orestes, opening scenes
Electra describes her brother's six days without food or bathing, tends him in sleep, and watches a fit in which he sees the Furies.
- Ivanhoe, Chapter XXVIII
Scott's account of Jewish physicians in medieval England, Rebecca's training under Miriam, her balsam for Ivanhoe's wound and her sedative draught.
- Julius Caesar, Act 2, Scene 1
Brutus has not slept since Cassius first stirred him and compares the interval before the deed to a hideous dream; Portia notes his sickness of mind.
- Laws, Book VII
Infants rocked to sleep and the Corybantic cure of frenzy by music and dance, explained as outer motion calming inner agitation.
- Legends of Charlemagne, Orlando Mad
Orlando reads Angelica and Medoro's names in the grotto, wanders all night, lies insensible three days and nights, then strips off his armour and rages through the countryside uprooting trees and attacking shepherds and flocks.
- Letters and Papers from Prison, Early letters to parents, April–May 1943
The first days of isolation in Tegel, physical conditions of the cell, and his deliberate adoption of routine.
- Macbeth, Act 2, Scene 1–2
The hallucinated dagger; the voice crying 'Sleep no more'; the drugged possets given to the grooms.
- Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 1
Lady Macbeth's sleepwalking and hand-washing observed by the Doctor and Gentlewoman.
- Meditations, Book 5.1
Argument with himself about getting out of bed in the morning.
- Mourning Becomes Electra, Homecoming, Act Four
During a heart attack Christine gives Ezra a pellet in place of his medicine; he accuses her before dying, and Lavinia finds the box.
- Natural History: A Selection, Book 20, poppy traditions
Poppy preparations appear among sleep- and pain-related remedies, with danger implicit in potency.
- Novum Organum, Book II, Aphorism L
Medicines that condense the flesh or the spirits: mild soporifics (violet, dried roses, lettuce), rose-water for fainting fits, and opiates that expel the spirits from the brain's ventricles yet in moderation may aid cure and longevity.
- On the Road, Throughout
Marathon drives, all-night jazz clubs and continuous drinking, with sleep deprivation treated as a kind of ecstasy.
- Orlando: A Biography, Chapter 2 (opening)
The seven-day trance after Sasha's flight, the failed folk remedies, and Orlando's altered memory on waking.
- Othello, Act 3, Scene 3
Othello complains of a pain upon his forehead and Desdemona offers to bind it with the handkerchief; later Iago calls jealous fancies poisons and says no poppy or mandragora will bring Othello sleep again.
- Richard III, Act 4, Scene 1; Act 4, Scene 4
Anne says Richard's timorous dreams kept waking her; the Duchess of York recalls his birth and infancy as a grievous burden.
- Richard III, Act 5, Scene 3
The ghosts of Richard's victims visit his tent; he wakes in a sweat to the trembling and terror of conscience.
- Selected Short Stories, 'The Horla', early diary entries
Fever-like malaise, insomnia and nightmares of being strangled and drained in sleep.
- Sense and Sensibility, Vol. II, Ch. 7–9
Marianne's grief after Willoughby's letter: refusal of food, sleeplessness and hysterical weeping, while Elinor attends her.
- Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Part Two, 'By the River'
Contemplating drowning, Siddhartha hears Om, falls into a long sleep and wakes renewed.
- Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Dr. Lanyon's Narrative
Lanyon inventories the drawer of white salt, the blood-red liquid and the notebook of experiments, then watches the visitor drink and transform.
- Summa Theologica, I, Q. 84, Arts. 7–8
Understanding depends on phantasms; lesions in frenzy and lethargy impair it; sleep, vapours, fever-dreams and partly lucid dreams explained physiologically.
- Summa Theologica, I-II, Q. 38 (not in stored text)
Remedies of sorrow: pleasure, weeping, the sympathy of friends, contemplation of truth, and sleep and baths, which restore the body's natural movement.
- Swann's Way, Overture, opening pages
The narrator's states between sleep and waking, in which he loses track of time and place and reconstructs the room around him.
- Tales from Shakespeare, King Lear, after the storm
Cordelia's physicians put off her meeting with her father until sleep and herbal medicine restore some composure to his mind.
- Tales from Shakespeare, Macbeth, after Duncan's murder
Macbeth hears a voice crying that he has murdered sleep and shall sleep no more.
- The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Ch. 11
Tom's guilty conscience disturbs his sleep and he talks in his sleep, alarming Sid.
- The Age of Fable, Chapter XXXIV, Oracle of Aesculapius
The sick sleep in the temple at Epidaurus to receive healing responses; Bulfinch compares the cure to mesmerism and tells how the god's serpent came to Rome in a time of pestilence.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 1, Sect. 2, Memb. 2, Subs. 5–7
Bad air, immoderate exercise, solitariness and idleness, and disordered sleeping and waking as causes of melancholy.
- The Anatomy of Melancholy, Part. 2, Sect. 5, Memb. 1, Subs. 2 and 6
Bloodletting for melancholy; correctors of insomnia and fearful dreams using poppy, mandrake, henbane, nightshade, hemp-seed and opiates.
- The Argonautica, Book III, Medea's night and the charm of Prometheus
Medea's sleepless night of divided thought, followed by the narrator's account of the flower sprung from Prometheus' ichor and how she gathered it.
- The Bhagavad Gita, Ch. 6.16–6.17
Yoga is not for one who eats or sleeps too much or too little; moderation in food, recreation, sleep and waking.
- The Blue Fairy Book, Sleeping Beauty
The princess’s long sleep under enchantment.
- The Canon of Medicine, Book I, Part 2, Thesis 2, paras. 336-345
Effects of sleep, wakefulness and insomnia; the passions as movements of the breath, with fear, anger, gloom and shame; the parents' imagination and the offspring.
- The Comedy of Errors, Act 5, Scene 1
The Abbess traces the husband's supposed madness to broken sleep, disturbed meals and barred recreation leading to fever and melancholy, and offers syrups, drugs and prayers.
- The Conquest of Gaul, Book V.35–40
Cotta wounded in the face by a sling during the ambush; in Cicero's besieged camp even the sick and wounded get no rest, and the ill commander works through the nights.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh, Tablet XI
Utnapishtim challenges Gilgamesh to stay awake six days and seven nights; he falls asleep at once, and loaves set out each day, in stages of staleness and mould, prove how long he slept.
- The Gulag Archipelago, Part I, chapter on interrogation
Methods of interrogation, including sleep deprivation, cold, hunger and prolonged standing, and their effects on body and will.
- The Interpretation of Dreams, Chapter I
Survey of external, internal sensory and organic stimuli as causes of dreams, including experiments on sleepers and the views of physicians and psychiatrists on dreams and insanity.
- The Life of Samuel Johnson, 1776 (Aetat. 67)
Johnson's advice on constitutional melancholy: divert rather than combat distressing thoughts, keep a lamp lit, read when wakeful.
- The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Chapter XIII
Poirot explains the bromide precipitation of strychnine in the tonic and the narcotic in the cocoa that delayed the symptoms.
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Ch. 4-7
Pym's confinement in the Grampus hold combines darkness, foul air, hunger, thirst, fear and possible delirious misperception.
- The Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, Closing reflections
Sleepless nights of weeping after her restoration, which she interprets through Psalm 6.
- The Persian Expedition, Book III, Chapter I
Xenophon's distress, insomnia and dream of lightning striking his father's house, which he interprets as both promise and warning before taking command.
- The Princess and Curdie, Chapter 19, The King's Chamber
Irene describes her father's nightly wandering and the doctor's medicine that is not really medicine but wine; Dr Kelman rouses the king and appears to run something bright into his arm.
- The Ramayana, Book VI, Cantos LX-LXVII
Kumbhakarna, Ravan's giant brother, is roused with great effort from his long sleep to fight and is killed by Rama.
- The Raven, Stanzas 1-2
Midnight sleeplessness and the attempt to find relief from sorrow in books.
- The Rule of St Benedict, Chapters 8–20
Night offices, prayer and sleep structure the body’s daily rhythm.
- The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., Rip Van Winkle
Rip drinks repeatedly from the ninepin players' flagon, sleeps twenty years, and on waking at first blames the flagon; later he cannot say who he is before the village crowd.
- The Story of My Boyhood and Youth, Chapter VII
Rising at one in the morning all winter to study and invent, and the early-rising machine that tips him out of bed.
- The Taming of the Shrew, Act 4, Scene 1
Petruchio throws out the supper as burnt meat that engenders choler, then explains in soliloquy his plan to keep Kate hungry and sleepless like an untrained hawk.
- The Tempest, Act 1, Scene 2; Act 2, Scene 1
Prospero charms Miranda asleep, and Ariel brings a heavy, sudden sleep on all the courtiers except Antonio and Sebastian.
- The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Chapter VIII, The Deadly Poppy Field
The scent of the poppies overpowers Dorothy, Toto and the Lion, and the friends who do not breathe must carry Dorothy out before she sleeps forever.
- Theogony and Works and Days, Theogony, ll. 211-225 and 758-766
Night bears Death, Sleep and the tribe of Dreams; later Sleep and Death dwell together beneath the earth.
- Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Chapter IV
Tweedledum and Tweedledee show Alice the snoring Red King and tell her she is only a sort of thing in his dream.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Prologue, §5
The last man: health-conscious, conflict-averse, managing his days with small doses of poison for pleasant dreams and a larger dose for a pleasant death; dissenters go voluntarily into the madhouse.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Part I, Discourse II: The Academic Chairs of Virtue
A sage's lecture on sleep hygiene as ethics: ten self-overcomings, reconciliations, truths and laughters a day as 'poppy to the soul'.
- Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Introduction by Mrs Förster-Nietzsche (stored text, before the Prologue)
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche describes the Rapallo winter of influenza and her brother's effort in spring 1883 to stop taking chloral hydrate.
- Troilus and Criseyde, Book I
Troilus is struck by love and displays classic lovesickness: pallor, secrecy, sighing, sleeplessness and obsessive thought.
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Nocturnal poems
Night settings intensify solitude, sleepless reflection and the speaker's need to address an absent beloved.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter XV
Washington's rules for keeping body and nerves fit, his reliance on sleep as a warning sign, and his habit of short naps.
- Up from Slavery, Chapter XVI
On the voyage to Europe he sleeps fifteen hours a day and first realizes how tired he is after eighteen years of work.
- Villette, Ch. XV
The long vacation: Lucy alone with a disabled pupil, then wholly alone, sleepless and despairing, until she confesses at a church and collapses.
- Villette, Ch. XXXVIII
Lucy is given a sweet drink containing a strong opiate; instead of sleep it brings excitement, and she walks out to the moonlit park festival.
Quotes
“nor has rhubarb always proved a purge, or opium a soporific to every one, who has taken these medicines”
“But is not a man drunk and sober the same person? why else is he punished for the fact he commits when drunk, though he be never afterwards conscious of it”
“The thought of suicide is a great consolation: by means of it one gets successfully through many a bad night”
“Till now, I had been a great sleeper, but a total privation of repose, with other alarming symptoms which have accompanied it, even to this time, persuaded me I had but a short time to live”
Frequently cited
“In short, he became so absorbed in his books that he spent his nights from sunset to sunrise, and his days from dawn to dark, poring over them; and what with little sleep and much reading his brains got so dry that he lost his wits”
“When I dance, I dance; when I sleep, I sleep”
“In thy faint slumbers I by thee have watch’d, And heard thee murmur tales of iron wars”
“Aeneas my eyes cling to through all my waking hours; Aeneas is my heart through the night and through the day.”
“From rest and sleepe, which but thy pictures bee, Much pleasure, then from thee, much more must flow”
“And poppie, or charmes can make us sleepe as well, And better then thy stroake; why swell'st thou then?”
Frequently cited
“Sweet charm of sleep, savior in sickness, how sweetly you came to me, how needed!”
“Between the acting of a dreadful thing And the first motion, all the interim is Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream”
“Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleave of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast”
Frequently cited
“Out, damned spot! out, I say”
“In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present—I am rising to the work of a human being.”
“But opiates, and the like, banish the spirits by their malignant and hostile quality”
Frequently cited
“Not poppy, nor mandragora, Nor all the drowsy syrups of the world, Shall ever medicine thee to that sweet sleep Which thou ow’dst yesterday.”
“Jesus will be in agony even to the end of the world. We must not sleep during that time”
Frequently cited
“My conscience hath a thousand several tongues, And every tongue brings in a several tale, And every tale condemns me for a villain.”
“Marianne would have thought herself very inexcusable had she been able to sleep at all the first night after parting from Willoughby”
“My life is shaken to its roots; sleep has left me; the deadliest terror sits by me at all hours of the day and night”
“If, however, the evaporation be somewhat less, phantasms appear, but distorted and without sequence; thus it happens in a case of fever”
Frequently cited
“For a long time I used to go to bed early.”
“by the help of sleep and medicine, she and her physicians at length succeeded in winding up the untuned and jarring senses which the cruelty of his other daughters had so violently shaken.”
“Here the sick sought responses and the recovery of their health by sleeping in the temple.”
“Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men, and must therefore be speedily helped, and sleep by all means procured”
Frequently cited
“And fast did her heart throb within her breast, as a sunbeam quivers upon the walls of a house when flung up from water, which is just poured forth in a caldron or a pail may be; and hither and thither on the swift eddy does it dart and dance along; even so the maiden’s heart quivered in her breast.”
“Cicero himself, though he was in very weak health, did not leave himself the night-time for repose, so that he was forced to spare himself by the spontaneous movement and entreaties of the soldiers”
Frequently cited
“The dream is the guardian of sleep, not the disturber of it”
“As soon as he was fully awake, the first clear thought which came into his head was, Why am I lying here”
Frequently cited
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—”
“I was myself last night, but I fell asleep on the mountain, and they’ve changed my gun, and everything’s changed, and I’m changed, and I can’t tell what’s my name, or who I am!”
Frequently cited
“This is a way to kill a wife with kindness”
Frequently cited
“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises, Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.”
“A little poison now and then: that maketh pleasant dreams. And much poison at last for a pleasant death”
“No small art is it to sleep: it is necessary for that purpose to keep awake all day”
“How I used to pray to Heaven for consolation and support!”