What is insomnia? Insomnia is boring. Dull to hear about and even more tedious to experience. It’s searching “where is joss stone now” at 3 a.m. (filming Instagram Stories about baking, is where, crooning softly to the camera Isn’t this delicious? as she fingers a tray of vegan peanut butter brownies) and nervy, aching teeth, and the desire the following day to consume more fistfuls of sugary fruit than a fully grown bonobo. It’s fielding suggestions from literally everybody about lavender and melatonin and some CBD oil that helped their sister-in-law, and it’s ordering poorly formatted e-books by gurus who’ve cracked a code overlooked by the entire medical establishment, yours for only twelve pounds ninety-nine.
The spring my marriage came apart it seemed the world had recast itself in exaggeratedly biblical relief. Across the land prophets preached exodus from Europe; violent rainstorms lashed the streets of Manchester. On the night of the Brexit referendum my husband and I had one final row and I perceived that our private crisis had assumed its place in another, much larger narrative – some crunching of tectonic plates on a mighty scale. Leaving him felt brave, timely. It felt like the only option.
You could barely move, in fin-de-siècle Mitteleuropa, without encountering something mystical, transcendental, or at least a bit occultish. From Rilke to Madame Blavatsky, counter-Enlightenment was in the air — or, possibly, had leaked into the water supply. At any rate, it had managed to make its way up the Danube and into the sleepy Austrian village of one Rudolf Steiner, who at nine years old had already begun communing with a dead aunt and detecting visions of the spiritual realm within the pages of his geometry textbook.