The Hammock Papers: nap theory

Showing posts with label nap theory. Show all posts

13 February 2025

Napping.

Scientific American has Edison's napping technique ...

Thomas Edison was famously opposed to sleeping. In an 1889 interview published in Scientific American, the ever energetic inventor of the lightbulb claimed he never slept more than four hours a night. Sleep was, he thought, a waste of time.

Yet Edison might have relied on slumber to spur his creativity. The inventor is said to have napped while holding a ball in each hand, presuming that, as he fell asleep, the orbs would fall to the floor and wake him. This way he could remember the sorts of thoughts that come to us as we are nodding off, which we often do not recall.

19 March 2024

Paradise.

Wyeth, Ides of March, 1974

I WANT to SLEEP

I shall be still stronger.

Still clearer, purer, so let

The sweet invasion of oblivion come on.

I want to sleep.

If I could forget myself, if I were only

A tranquil tree.

Branches to spread out the silence.

Trunk of mercy.

The great darkness, grown motherly,

Deepens little by little.

Brooding over this body that the soul —

After a pause — surrenders.

It may even embark from the endless world.

From its accidents.

And, scattering into stars at the last.

The soul will be daybreak.

Abandoning myself to my accomplice.

My boat,

I shall reach on my ripples and mists

Into the dawn.

I do not want to dream of useless phantoms,

I do not want a cave.

Let the huge moonless spaces

Hold me apart and defend me.

Let me enjoy so much harmony

Thanks to the ignorance

Of this being, that is so secure

It pretends to be nothing.

Night with its darkness, solitude with its peace.

Everything favors

My delight in the emptiness

That soon will come.

Emptiness, O paradise

Rumored about so long:

Sleeping, sleeping, growing alone

Very slowly.

Darken me, erase me.

Blessed sleep.

As I lie under a heaven that mounts

Its guard over me.

Earth, with your darker burdens.

Drag me back down.

Sink my being into my being:

Sleep, sleep.

Jorge Guillen

11 February 2024

The most necessary task of civilization is to teach people how to think. It should be the primary purpose of our public schools. The mind of a child is naturally active, it develops through exercise. Give a child plenty of exercise, for body and brain. The trouble with our way of educating is that it does not give elasticity to the mind. It casts the brain into a mold. It insists that the child must accept. It does not encourage original thought or reasoning, and it lays more stress on memory than observation.

Thomas Edison, born on this day in 1847

Edison's ...

14 September 2021

Medical.

22 July 2020

Thinking.

WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

"When I am, as it were, completely myself, entirely alone and of good cheer – say travelling in a carriage or walking after a good meal, or during the night when I cannot sleep – it is on such occasions that my ideas flow best and most abundantly. Whence, and how, they come I know not ; nor can I force them. Those ideas that please me I retain in memory and am accustomed, as I have been told, to hum them to myself. If I continue in this way, it soon occurs to me how I may turn this dainty morsel to account, so as to make a good dish of it. That is to say, agreeable to the rules of counterpoint, to the peculiarities of various instruments etc. All this fires my soul, and, provided I am not disturbed, my subject enlarges itself, becomes methodised, and defined, and the whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my mind, so that I can survey it like a fine picture or a beautiful statue at a glance. Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once. What a delight this is, I cannot tell."

MARCUS AURELIUS

"Is your cucumber bitter? Throw it away. Are there briars in your path? Turn aside. That is enough. Do not go on and say, 'Why were things of this sort ever brought into this world?' neither intolerable nor everlasting - if thou bearest in mind that it has its limits, and if thou addest nothing to it in imagination. Pain is either an evil to the body (then let the body say what it thinks of it!)-or to the soul. But it is in the power of the soul to maintain its own serenity and tranquility."

VINCENT van GOGH

"What am I in the eyes of most people? A nonentity or an oddity or a disagreeable person — someone who has and will have no position in society, in short a little lower than the lowest. Very well — assuming that everything is indeed like that, then through my work I’d like to show what there is in the heart of such an oddity, such a nobody. This is my ambition, which is based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Even though I’m often in a mess, inside me there’s still a calm, pure harmony and music. In the poorest little house, in the filthiest corner, I see paintings or drawings. And my mind turns in that direction as if with an irresistible urge. As time passes, other things are increasingly excluded, and the more they are the faster my eyes see the picturesque. Art demands persistent work, work in spite of everything, and unceasing observation."

DAN CAMPBELL