In Samuel Beckett's final days in a nursing home in Paris, just before his death, in 1989, a copy of Dante's Divine Comedy lay on his bedside table. It was a copy that dated back to Beckett's student days, in Dublin, for Dante was a lifelong passion.
The haunting power of memory imbued much of Beckett’s later work, and that particular book must have cast a certain spell. One can easily imagine Beckett reading a few lines in bed, lines known by heart, before turning out the light.
What we read before we sleep has always held a particular significance. There was a time when the emphasis fell on literature that was instructive and rigorous, so that each night you primed yourself for the challenges and temptations that lay ahead.
All those Gideon Bibles in all those hotel rooms surely signify a belief in the potential of words read in the minutes before sleep to change your life. Or, at least, that a verse or two swirling around your head might protect you from your own worst dreams. For sleep, or, as Shakespeare called it, “death’s second self”, has that hint of finality. For most of our lives we believe implicitly that our sleep will be followed by our awaking.
With age or ill health, perhaps a few doubts creep in, our confidence wanes, but if, like Beckett in the nursing home, you know that each night could be your last, then the words you read before sleep become a form of prayer.
These days, however, any notion of our bed as an island secluded from the world’s affairs is fanciful. We take our work to bed, catch up on television shows or movies, drop ourselves into the maelstrom of social media. We’re spoiled for choice. We move from room to room with our tablets and phones, one room much the same as another. Last thing at night in our bedrooms we can watch, in graphic detail, the worst of the cruelties that man is inflicting upon man.
It’s a far cry from the concept of retiring to bed, from the hope that those minutes before sleep might allow a falling away of the day’s concerns. But it is still true that to read something extraordinary last thing at night – a few pages of fiction, a poem – can redeem a wasted or disappointing day.
Wallace Stevens described poetry as "the imagination pressing back against the pressures of reality". For all of us, those pressures seem greater than ever; for Beckett, faced with an almost unbearable reality, it was surely "the imagination pressing back" that he sought and needed in Dante's wonderful lines.
