The art of lying down: a guide to horizontal living PDF
Preview The art of lying down: a guide to horizontal living
Also by Bernd Brunner Inventing the Christmas Tree Moon: A Brief History Bears: A Brief History The Ocean at Home: An Illustrated History of the Aquarium The Art of Lying Down Originally published in the German language as Die Kunst des Liegens: Handbuch der horizontalen Lebensform by Bernd Brunner Copyright © 2012 by Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Köln / Germany Translation copyright © 2013 by Lori Lantz First Melville House printing: November 2013 Melville House Publishing 8 Blackstock Mews 145 Plymouth Street and Islington Brooklyn, NY 11201 London N4 2BT mhpbooks.com facebook.com/mhpbooks @melvillehouse ISBN: 978-1-61219310-6 (ebook) A catalog record is available for this book from the Library of Congress. v3.1 A thing that can’t be done in bed isn’t worth doing at all. —Groucho Marx Contents Cover Other Books by This Author Title Page Copyright Epigraph Are You Lying Down? The Grammar of Horizontal Orientation Drawn to the Center of the Earth Chesterton and the Secret of Michelangelo Shaking Up the Act of Lying Down Common and Uncommon Ways to Lie Down Lying Down in the Great Outdoors Sun Worshippers The Proper Way to Lie Down Position as the Key to Personality So Easy a Child Can Do It Lying Down Together Lying Down, Sleeping, Waking Up Awake, Napping, Asleep Eating and Lying Down: Better Together? Horizontal—but Hard at Work The History of the Mattress The Archaeology of Lying Down The Oriental Roots of the Art of Lying Down Field Studies of Bedrooms and Reclining Habits The Typical Bed Lying Down on the Road Strange Bedfellows Mechanized Reclining Horizontal Healing Floating, Rocking, Swinging The Puzzle of the Recliner The Best Place for the Bed Lying Down as the Stuff of Dreams—and Nightmares The Museum of Reclining Are You Still Lying Down? For Further Reading Illustration and Photo Credits Acknowledgments Are You Lying Down? If you’re lying down right now, there’s no need to defend yourself. We all do it regularly, and often we enjoy it. We lie down to relax, assuming the posture that offers the body the least resistance and demands the least energy. And we perform all sorts of activities this way: we sleep and dream, make love, contemplate, give ourselves over to wistful moods, daydream, and suffer. But there’s one thing we rarely do in this state: move around. When we stretch out horizontally, we come the closest we can to remaining still. In a society attuned to measurable performance, where quickly making and acting on decisions are what matters and people prove themselves by sitting for long hours at their desks and in front of their computers, reclining often goes unappreciated. Even worse, it is seen as proof of indolence or a sign of powerlessness in a fast-changing world. You can’t keep up when you’re lying down. Those who do anyway are considered weak or criticized for not putting their time to better use. Yet lying down can feel like taking a walk in a thick fog: we often emerge with clearer thoughts than before. As a calculated move to escape the ever-present pressure to be fast and efficient, conscious reclining costs nothing and is yet extremely valuable. Lying down is the horizontal counterpart of the dreamy rambling of a melancholy flâneur, who walks about without pursuing any goal. Someone in repose may wander through town and countryside, too, but generally only in his or her imagination. These fanciful strolls demand a higher level of creativity since no real faces and places show up to stimulate the resting wanderer’s thoughts. When we lie on our back and direct our gaze up toward the ceiling or sky, we lose our physical grasp of things and our thoughts soar. Our mental makeup and even the structure of our perception can change with this shift of position. Responses that seemed perfectly natural a few minutes earlier, when we were standing upright, become inexplicable. Questions that were so important appear in a different light when we view them horizontally. Voices and even the ringing of a telephone may no longer reach us with the same urgency as when we are standing. In no other position can certainties suddenly seem less certain. When we lie down, perhaps because we feel overwhelmed, a burden falls from our shoulders. But perception patterns differ, possibly even from person to person. Lin Yutang, the Chinese writer, once claimed that “our senses are the keenest in that moment” when we are lying down, and he goes on to say that “all good music should be listened to in the lying position.” Thinking about what it means to recline involves not only questions of physiology, psychology, and creativity but also the economy of time and the pace of our lives, which the American psychologist Robert Levine once tellingly described as “a tangled arrangement of cadences, of perpetually changing rhythms and sequences, stresses and calms, cycles and spikes.” If and when lying down is acceptable all depends on the attitudes towards time. We operate in time, and it governs our behavioral cycles like a silent language. In an age and culture like ours, which has internalized a compulsion for constant movement and bred an internal agitation that rules every aspect of our lives, there is little we can do but turn the screws of time and adapt to its demanding rhythm. In places with different rhythms from our own, where activities emerge from what’s happening at the moment rather than from what has been planned, we can get a sense of what it means to live within time that follows different laws. In other societies, a moment when nothing seems to be happening may not be seen as a “waste of time,” but rather as something pleasant and essential to life. Another reason to give the horizontal world a closer look.
The list of books you might like
