06 June 2012

There is between sleep and us something like a pact, a treaty with no secret clauses, and according to this convention it is agreed that, far from being a dangerous, bewitching force, sleep will become domesticated and serve as an instrument of our power to act. We surrender to sleep, but in the way that the master entrusts himself to the slave who serves him.

– Maurice Blanchot (b. 1907), French literary theorist, author. “Sleep, Night,” appendices, The Space of Literature (1955, trans. 1982).