On sleepless nights the soul is closer by. On these nights, like Shen Zhou, I find my own "clamor not at rest." "Seldom," Shen wrote of his own "Night Vigil," does man "find the outside calm and the inner world at peace." Shen did find serenity on his sleepless night in 1492. I do not, not on this or other sleepless nights. There is only the clamor not at rest and "restless thoughts...lonely and sad." Those thoughts and feelings are true. They are as true as the contentment that Shen found. I value them for their truth and I will feel them truly. Happiness, or its pursuit, is not all that man is about.
I locate my soul in my chest. Not Nabokov: "Although we read with our minds, the seat of artistic delight" is in the spine. "That little shiver behind," he said, "is quite certainly the highest form of emotion that humanity has attained...Let us worship the spine and its tingle." I must feel, and I do worship the capacity that I have to feel, and its product, its tingle, whether that tingle is happiness, restlessness, sadness or pain.
"Let us be proud of our being vertebrates," Nabokov continued, "for we are vertebrates tipped at the head with a divine flame."
"Tipped at the head with a divine flame." There is no more moving nor more beautiful description of man's soul. "The brain only continues the spine: the wick really goes through the whole length of the candle. If we are not capable of enjoying that shiver...we cannot enjoy literature..."
A flame, even one divine, can devour: the wick, the spine, emotion. It is this man's choice to resist that and to feel all.
