Awake for the Blue Hour

One of the curses of middle life is sleeplessness. The brain produces less melatonin, breathing is shallower, dreams are fitful, the bladder cannot hold. One wakes many times, shuffling to the bathroom, or to the kitchen for a midnight snack (sleep experts say that a man of 50 wakes 20 times in the night; a man of 25 only 10 times). Delta sleep (the deepest level of non rapid-eye-movement sleep, where the sleeper cannot be easily roused) becomes as rare as a remembered dream. One turns off the light, and prays for sleep like a child hoping to be visited by the tooth fairy.

But every curse carries its own blessing (at last the midlife mind gets that nothing is ever one thing, that contradiction suffuses every enterprise): one of insomnia’s gifts is the reverie of the blue hour. The blue hour is that time which belongs neither to the night nor to the day; it is when the sky is born again into soft pinks and blues, when the light in the east is as clear as a baby’s urine, when flowers, moist with dew, are said to be at their most fragrant. The French call this time L’Heure Bleue, and even created, in 1912, a perfume called L’Heure Bleue by Guerlain. (Odd to think of this legendary perfume, which is still available at $68 for a 1.7 ounce bottle, being created just two years before the outbreak of World War I, when Europe would stink with corpses rotting in the trenches in The Ardennes, Mons, and The Somme.)

Sylvia Plath loved this part of the day, “that blue, almost eternal hour,” as she put it in an interview with the BBC a few months before her death, “before cock crow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles.” Plath was writing some of the best poems of her short life during this time. She was living with her children in a flat in London (after Ted Hughes had left her for Assia Wevill) in the house where William Butler Yeats had once lived. There was a blue plaque to mark the spot, a detail Plath records with great excitement in a letter home to her mother, Aurelia, in Massachusetts. Sylvia, who had never failed at anything in her life, was trying to be upbeat, even though her heart was broken. The poems came fast as Plath’s horse, Ariel, and Plath knew they were good, as good as anything by Yeats, but that certitude wasn’t enough to keep her tethered to this world.

She killed herself very early on the morning of February 11, 1963, thrusting her head in an oven, while her two young children slept. History repeated itself forty-six years later during the afternoon of March 23, 2009 with the suicide of her son, Nicholas Hughes, an accomplished fisheries biologist who hung himself with a rope in his home in Fairbanks, Alaska. Hughes was 47, outliving his mother by 17 years. In her announcement to the press, Frieda Hughes said that her brother had been battling depression for many years.

On a memorial website page that the University of Alaska created, one of Nick Hughes’ students recalls how her professor would go out with his students at three in the morning during the summer solstice to observe the salmon and grayling fish in the Chena River.

It is twilight now, evensong instead of matins, the return of the blue hour. The sky is slightly darker like the inside of a mussel shell, the bare branches of the trees wispy as an old woman’s hair, the light clear as a glass of white wine. I say a prayer for Sylvia Plath and her son, Nicholas Hughes, who might still be with us, had they received proper treatment for their depression, whose love for the blue hour endures.