I see my reflection in this remark of Father Hardouin:
“Do you think I got myself out of bed at 4 o’clock in the morning every day of my life in order to think like everyone else?”
I have got up at that same hour almost every day, since I lost the habit almost forty years ago of sleeping through the night. And to think otherwise than everybody else (simply by recasting everybody’s observations) comes almost naturally to anyone who feels uncommonly wide-awake when most others are asleep. From this I formed the habit of considering the common view of things as an expedient, always untrustworthy. Each one of us must perhaps do his utmost to find, or render false, everything that is accepted as true by all—at least in his private usage.
— Paul Valéry, Moi: The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 15 (Bollingen Recollections)
This amused me, because way back in my twenties, I started a poem (don’t recall if I ever finished it) with the lines:
In the darkest hours
While you were sleeping
I was awake
And on the move
On one hand, it was quite literal. I was working in the newspaper distributorship, so I was working from midnight to eight a.m. or so. But the double meaning involved a little Nietzschean-style self-aggrandizement: “I’m out here in the cold, staring into the abyss, thinking Deep Thoughts, while you snore away, swaddled in your warm clichés and conventional wisdom.” Boy, I was proud of my cleverness. Did I mention I was in my early twenties?
What makes the passage considerably funnier is Father Jean Hardouin, whom Valéry quotes approvingly. Hardouin was not merely an independent thinker. He became notorious for arguing that nearly the entire corpus of classical Greek and Roman literature had been fabricated in the Middle Ages by monks, along with various other historical frauds. A recent scholarly treatment describes his thesis as claiming that all but a tiny number of ancient texts were late-medieval forgeries. (I have not yet found any evidence that he originated the phrase “WAKE UP, SHEEPLE!”)
So Hardouin saying, “You think I got up at four every morning to think like everybody else?” has the additional historical comedy of a man saying: “I didn’t wake up at four in the morning just to believe that Virgil actually wrote Virgil.” Father Jean and I were practicing what we might call graveyard-shift exceptionalism: the conviction that being awake at an abnormal hour confers some corresponding abnormality of mind. Sometimes the common view looks false because you’ve seen through convention. Sometimes it looks false because your circadian rhythm is wrecked and every thought has acquired that eerie 4 a.m. luminosity. If you think you’ve found an insight everyone else has missed, get eight hours of sleep. If it’s still there in the morning after coffee, you may be onto something.