Telegrams of the Soul

The Bed

Your bed is wonderful, a kind of refuge from the perils of waking life! But also a peril in and of itself — a kind of pre-casket, that is, in preparation for your passing. In bed your life absorbs obstructive strengths, all that which is supposed to hold back your demise lets go! Only outside your bed are you actually able to resist the thousand hostile forces of your life! In bed you are inescapably prone, decayed, and you yourself decay. Your bed shelters your preexistent store of strengths, but simultaneously hinders access to the new strengths to be derived from the fluid life of day! You withdraw yourself from the useful fight. Your bed is a kind of pre-casket! It is death in life! A soft death that permits a rising. But never forget it, grownup: children in the cradle, invalids in bed sleep endlessly long! That simply means they’re not yet up to living. Or else they’d tolerate “the waking state.” The waking man lives, the sleeper has died!

You can make amends for many sins with ample sleep—. But what if you commit none? Your bed is your pre-casket. As soon as you fall asleep in it, some precious thing or another perishes in you!