HKB
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Often appears with: the passions and the emotions · temperance · study vs rest · moderation, luxury, and excess · microcosm theory · medicine, disease, and healing
Usually: argument (1) · censure (1) · reverence (1)
“Life is to most, such as could not be endured without frequent intermission of existence: Homer, therefore, has thought it an office worthy of the goddess of wisdom, to lay Ulysses asleep when landed on Phaeacia.” Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, in Sixteen Volumes. Vol · observation
Johnson continues his essay on sleep, contrasting healthy rest with perpetual wakefulness, discussing the study-hours question, and arguing that sleep is tied to virtue, temperance, and the image of death.
paid, unless we could cease to be men; for Alexander declared, that nothing convinced him that he was not a divinity, but his not being able to live without sleep. To live without sleep in our present fluctuating state, however desirably it might seem to the lady in Clelia, can surely be the wish only of the young or the ignorant; to every one else, a perpetual vigil will appear to be a state of wretchedness, second…