'Early to rise’ and ‘up with the lark’,
which may once have seemed impossible indicators of moral virtue, is so easy to
achieve when one simply does not sleep at night and chooses instead to slumber
in daylight hours and write through the night. At around 6.30 a.m. one greets the
dawn like an old familiar friend, not an overwhelming foe, as if one is in
control of one’s destiny, instead of always scrambling behind, late and only
half awake, like the woman applying her make-up on the train, or the man I
once saw walking across the main road at Spit Junction in Mosman, at 8.30 a.m. shaving
with a pocket shaver. The best thing about it though is that not many people do
it, so it retains that exclusive secret edge of slightly illicit and novel
things, the hidden beach, the secluded garden, a surprise, separate to the rest
of the world. So that when I go to bed at 10 a.m. or 12 a.m., I fall asleep
secure in the knowledge that the world will go on without me very well, and
when I awake at 7 p.m. or so, I have the whole night ahead of me to write and I
will not get tired or need to sleep.
Ruth Skilbeck
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