Pirates You Don't Know, and Other Adventures in the Examined Life: Collected Essays

Languor

174 Languor It’s a feeling I’ve known since childhood, though it’s come only sporadically over the years: an extreme sleepiness without fatigue, a dream without sleep, a staggering drunk without the buzz, a codeine high without skin rash. My eyes won’t focus; I stumble. Usually it occurs in summertime or in the tropics or subtropics,but not every hot climate causes it,and sometimes I sink into it in some cool interior such as a public library. Melville describes the feeling, which he attributes to languor, washing over everyone aboard the ship Dolly: We abandoned the fore-peak altogether, and spreading an awning over the forecastle, slept, ate, and lounged under it the live-long day. Every one seemed to be under the influence of some narcotic. Even the officers aft, whose duty required them never to be seated while keeping a deck watch, vainly endeavoured to keep on their pins; and were obliged invariably to compromise the matter by leaning up against the bulwarks, and gazing abstractedly over the side. Reading was out of the question; take a book in your hand, and you were asleep in an instant. In the army we called it Brain Fever. For two or three days at a time we’d lie around like lotus eaters, missing meals, going unwashed, shirking our duties as dutifully as we could.The worst case I ever had was after jumping off a Blackhawk somewhere near Río Coclé del Norte, in the Republic of Panama, expecting to join my dive detachment but finding I’d beat them languor 175 there. I spent a soporific week by myself in an otherwise empty 16' × 32' tent belonging to a larger unit bivouacked high above the sea. It was hot and windy at night and hotter and more humid in the day, and I spent both days and nights sleeping or nearly asleep in that canvas tent, plagued by mosquitoes and weird dreams, and pacing like a sleepwalker. In the middle of one of those surreal nights a young pfc from the engineer battalion apparently walked off the cliff, fell several stories onto volcanic boulders, and was swept away by the breakers. When I was shaken awake roughly by fellow soldiers shining their flashlights in my eyes, they called me by his name, hoping upon hope he wasn’t sunk in that black sea. There were many rumors as to what really happened to him, but I’ve wondered all these years if it was death by languor. It has occurred to me that languor is a type of depression, though it feels nothing like the loss of the magic of adventure, when foreign mountains are suddenly just mountains, and not like being in love. I used to get it when I visited my sister’s home, where I felt unusually safe, and it interfered with my visit. I’ve also wondered if it might be useful, a protective mechanism to slow me down the way a bad summer cold will do when I’ve been working too hard, a way for the subconscious to get more time to work. Even when I fall asleep on the couch after dinner and pick my way through conversations like a dullard, I sometimes try to indulge the languor, if I have time or the ability, because it feels necessary. I also look for the thing that signals the end of it. A few months ago, in the midst of a languor misty enough to make my freshly painted walls drip, I got an unexpected e-mail from an old army friend, who led me to another. I hadn’t seen or spoken to Egg or Sammy since the early 1980s, and it seems odd to say they’ve been my lifelong friends, since I only knew them one or two years, a quarter of a century ago. But my memories of them are so plentiful and strong—confirmed now by speaking with them—that the people they were then have been with me since young adulthood, and something awful that Sammy did even showed up on page ninety-five of my first novel. And so—just as I was getting back to work on a novel set in the Gulf of Mexico, recently deep in oil, about a group of veterans looking for one of 176 languor their own and pulling into a Florida city...