In the end we needed two words to describe the things that happened during the ù, one word for the meaningless things and another for the seemingly meaningful. Maybe our ù -selves remembered only fragments of our waking lives and tried to make sense of them, too. We wondered if we were all living two lives, a day life and a night life, and we thought that each life might be the ù of the other one.
These things that happened were usually not sequential and frequently made no sense, except that sometimes they were sequential and made a kind of sense, although we only remembered a few of them, and not in full. Once we started calling it the ù, it began to feel comforting, even something to look forward to.īut we noticed that during the ù we weren’t absolutely absent there were things happening, sometimes to “us,” sometimes us as we were and at other times us at different ages or in different circumstances or with totally different characters – “us” but unlike ourselves… or, alternatively, things might be happening to complete strangers about whom we knew nothing. The word we made up for the nightly unconsciousness was this: ù. That was another new word, “normal.” The idea behind that word, the idea that there were norms, yardsticks against which things could be measured, was also new. Nobody can remember the name of the genius who thought of the word which allowed us to believe that this periodic unconsciousness was normal. Then they allowed us to be reborn in the morning and we were expected to be grateful. Before that we called it the nightly death and thought the gods inflicted it on us to remind us regularly of our puny mortality. In fact the very idea of the nightly unconsciousness was frightening, and we had only recently invented a word for it that wasn’t frightening. For example we didn’t have a word for the thing that happened in our heads during the nightly unconsciousness. In those early days of the world we didn’t have words for many things we didn’t understand.
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