Book Description

To reference death as sleep is commonplace. Indeed, so usual is the use of the terminology of rest, repose, and slumber to denote the process of dying and, indeed, death itself, that such linguistic turns barely call attention to themselves at all: to wish aloud that a deceased individual rest in peace could hardly be more ordinary a prayer even for moderns little given to lyrical expression or to the use of metaphor in daily speech. But to approach the equation from the other direction—and so to assert that, no less than death is sleep, sleep is death, or at least death dialed down sufficiently to deprive it of its permanence and awful finality—is less common a thing to say...and it is even less common than that actually to believe. Indeed, although the Talmud, speaking with strange precision, asserted long centuries ago that sleep is precisely one-sixtieth of death, it is hard to find moderns who comfortably or naturally think of awakening from a night’s sleep as a kind of daily resurrection.1 Consider, for example, the undeservedly obscure prayer of Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English polymath, who movingly wrote: