Do you love ideas — passionately, with blood?
Do you suffer insomnia because of that idea?
Do you feel that you are gambling your life on it?
How many thinkers would draw back!

Albert Camus

The future enters into us,
in order to transform itself in us,
long before it happens.

Rainer Maria Rilke

I

It’s five in the morning. The room is dark, deaf to sound. This bed, so unfamiliar, does not wrap you in its embrace the way your bed at home does. You cannot fall asleep — and yet you had managed to do so just a few hours ago. You had collapsed in front of the television, around eleven. Someone had turned the screen off for you, and you had managed to sleep for just a few hours. It was an uncomfortable sleep, sitting in the armchair, your head tilted to the side and a blanket over your legs. Then your neck started to hurt, the cold began to creep onto your uncovered chest, and the dryness in your mouth woke you up – the pizza you had for dinner must have been too salty. Your palate, dry and burning like a desert, demands water. You get up, gulp down two glasses, still in the dark. You pour a third glass, place it on the bedside table next to the bed, in this guest room that for tonight is yours. You slip under the covers.

Immediately, the usual incorrigible spectacle appears before you — yet another rerun of the same eternal monologue, staged in the theatre of your consciousness. It is your inner voice speaking: “what are you doing in bed? You have things to do, a book to write, events to organise.” Alongside your voice come the voices of others — their judgements, their sermons: “what are you doing with your life?”, they repeat, “you should have done this or that”, “you should have thought it through better, taken more time”, and so on, throwing more coal into the blast furnace of your doubt.

II

5.10 am. You hear some chirping outside the window. At this point you think you will not fall asleep again — not for tonight, at least . You might as well get up and start the day like this. Because the voices in your head never stop, not even for a moment — and you watch them speak, mute and exhausted, the way at midnight a waiter watches the customers at the last table who simply refuse to leave. That waiter is you, and those voices are the final obstacle between you and sleep.

Those who suffer from insomnia know what you are talking about; the others, instead, you already know what they will be thinking: “why don’t you just get up and do something? Read, write, watch a series.” If only it were that easy.

Those who do not know insomnia ignore a fundamental fact: insomnia is not a time of freedom. The insomniac is a slave to his wakefulness. He would like to silence those inner voices, but he cannot. The insomniac does not know the universal art of forgetfulness, the one that billions of good people practise every night, sleeping the sleep of the just.

“How do I switch my brain off?” you ask yourself, overwhelmed by such stubbornness, searching for a break in that unbearable wakefulness. In those moments, the blankets become rough like chains, the pillows unexpected guests in the bed, the silence a deafening chatter of voices all speaking in your direction, all at once. In those moments, there is no herbal tea or orgasm that can console you. You, like every other insomniac, have only one desire: to fall asleep.

III

5.15 am. “From this point of view,” you think, “insomnia and depression are first cousins.” You reflect on the comorbidity between the two — they who have lived inside you forever, as far as you can remember.

Insomnia and depression: those who have experienced the first probably know the second as well, and vice versa. Both conditions — in the eyes of the healthy ones, from the outside — seem like nothing more than a vice of the soul, a whim of the mind. “Why don’t you go for a run?” asks the friend to the depressed person who has not left the house for three days. But the depressed person certainly does not lack breath, nor legs to run, nor shoes or material things of that sort. The obstacle does not belong to the physical world. What he lacks is something else; it has to do with the realm of metaphysics.

What escapes the depressed person is not merely the reason why he should get up from that black sofa and go for a run. No: what escapes him is the universal reason why anyone should get up from their sofa to do anything at all.

These reflections may seem like literary devices and philosophical onanism, but that is precisely the point: depression is an elusive paradox of the soul, an inexplicable tumour, not a defect of will. A thoroughly human paradox, to which non-human animals seem to be immune, to their immeasurable fortune. “If it were enough not to want to be depressed in order not to be, who would ever choose to be so?”

IV

5.20 am. You are still here, eyes open and mind spinning like the centrifuge of a washing machine. You keep fighting the night, alternating hot flushes with moments of pure cold. You toss and turn. Your feet find no rest. Your head is full of thoughts, but they are not all negative. On the contrary, some ideas are so beautiful that you decide to get up, thinking it is worth trapping them on paper before losing them forever in this darkness with no terminus.

You turn on the light and jot down two words in your notebook.

The next day, upon the longed-for awakening, you will be able to reread that “crumb” on the page — as you call them — and unravel it like a skein of yarn. And yet no. Because as always, upon waking, you will have completely forgotten that crumb, or you will remember it but then spend a minute wondering what you had found so exciting about that idea just a few hours earlier.

You then fall back into the oblivion of doubt. Back to square one. Back to the starting point. Back to silently contemplating the blank canvas of nihilism. You are just like Sisyphus watching his boulder roll back down the hill.

V

5.25 am. In its dark wandering, your mind falls again on the expression of that friend of yours — Niko — who seems immune to sadness and never understands the reason for your suffering. “We live in the best of all possible worlds,” is his standard argument. “If I made it, anyone can make it, you just have to try hard enough.” He is the one in a thousand the newspapers talk about, and you are just one of the 999 who did not make the news, who did not succeed — not because the system is flawed, but because you did not try hard enough.

You curse in the dark. You rub your face, rub your eyes, searching for a decisive tiredness that unfortunately will never arrive. You then realise how humiliating an illness depression is. It leaves you “cuckolded and beaten”, as they say where you come from, incapable not only of doing anything — a run, a walk, a phone call — but also of defending yourself from the pity of your friends — they who look at you the way one looks at the neighbourhood tramp, towards whom one feels a certain sympathy, yes, but always thinking that, deep down, he must be the architect of his own fate.

“Get up and walk,” they tell you with their looks — but they are not the Messiah, and you are not Lazarus; you are just a man who at 37 would like to have found the peace of mind to sleep the sleep of the just and instead cannot.

VI

5.30 am. You feel like you are going crazy. You try one last desperate attempt to let go and fall asleep. You turn on the light, put on your glasses like a soldier loading the last magazine into his rifle, knowing there will be no others left. You open PornHub, scroll bored through the recommended videos until one catches your attention…