I remember reading an essay that I loved, but I can’t recall what it was called or who the author was.
It deals with staying up during the night. How the world is different and strange. I remember one line in particular saying that, without insomniacs and policemen on their beats, there would be nobody to weave the world of the previous day into the new day, and that everything might just disappear, or something.
Can anyone help me with this one?
Was it Stephen King? I think he has written prosaicly in a similar sense about this. I think it was in Insomnia and perhaps other stories.
It reminds me of the sort of thing that the late Jack Finney wrote, except that he wrote short stories and novels and not, AFAIK, essays.
I thought immediately of Fear and Loathing in Wal-Mart, but it doesn’t quite meet the second part of your description.
Found it!
I did some digging around, and I remembered two other essays in the book. “The Death of the Moth” by Virginia Woolf, and “Wordsworth in the Tropics” by Aldous Huxley.
The essay I was looking for is entitled “Endure the Night,” and was written by Loren Eiseley. Google the essay, you get exactly two hits. One to a library site, one to an eBay auction. Both of them are on the book of essays, published in the 1960s. Pretty darn obscure.
Thanks for your help, and if you can track down the essay, read it! (Actually, the whole collection is really good.)