Why Does Anyone Sleep?

Theodore Pruitt, Correspondence Chapter

Dear fellow members,

I hope you will forgive an old man writing to you from Nebraska, as I do not get to meet any of you in the usual way. I was a county surveyor for forty years. I drew this question by post in the spring of last year. The envelope had no return address, which I thought was a nice touch.

Well, I have read what they have to say about it. Memory gets filed, the brain gets rinsed out, and so on. That is all fine for the body. But a cow can rest and a man can rest on a bus with his eyes open. Why should the mending of the house need the fellow who lives there to leave it? Nobody has been able to tell me that, and I have asked at the library.

I keep it at three o’clock, as the fourth Form directs. I sit at the kitchen table. It is very quiet here at that hour and I have come to look forward to it. I am now up to fourteen months, though they tell me thirty nights is the rule. I did not see any harm in it.

3:11. I don’t feel much difference anymore between the two conditions. I mean being up and not.

3:40. Marjorie has asked me to mention that I have begun answering her before she has finished speaking. I don’t notice it myself. She asked me to put that in. I believe she asked me.

Yours in the work,
Ted Pruitt