I just thought I'd post a short excerpt from Edward Said's Out of Place: A Memoir. His name got brought up elsewhere on BL and it made me think of this:
Sleeplessness for me is a cherished state to be desired at almost any cost: there is nothing for me as invigorating as immediately shedding the shadowy half-consciousness of a night's loss, than the early morning, reacquainting myself with or resuming what I might have lost completely few hours earlier. I occasionally experience myself as a cluster of flowing currents. I prefer this idea of a solid self, the identity to which so many attach so much significance. These currents, like the theme of one's life, flow along during the waking hours, and at their best, they require no reconciling, no harmonizing. They are "off" and may be out place, but at least they are always in motion, in time, in place, in the form of all kinds of strange combinations moving about, not necessarily forward, sometimes against each other, the contrapuntally yet without one central theme. A form of freedom, I'd like to think, even if I am far from being totally convinced that it is. That skepticism too is one of the themes I particularly want to hold on to. With so many dissonances in my life I have learned actually to prefer being not quite right and out of place.
