Cosmopolis
A Novel
Chapter One
Sleep failed him more often now, not once or
twice a week but four times, five. What did he
do when this happened? He did not take long
walks into the scrolling dawn. There was no
friend he loved enough to harrow with a call.
What was there to say? It was a matter of
silences, not words.
He tried to read his way into sleep but only
grew more wakeful. He read science and poetry.
He liked spare poems sited minutely in white
space, ranks of alphabetic strokes burnt into
paper. Poems made him conscious of his
breathing. A poem bared the moment to things he
was not normally prepared to notice. This was
the nuance of every poem, at least for him, at
night, these long weeks, one breath after
another, in the rotating room at the top of the
triplex.
He tried to sleep standing up one night, in his
meditati ... read full excerpt from Cosmopolis: A Novel ebook
