sarah eve kelly

It is 6:26 in the morning, approximately five and a half hours before an academic paper of indeterminate length, written by me, must land tidily - citations and page numbers in, scribbles and screams out - in the inbox of my superior. Em, my supervisor. My supervisor who is superior.

Please don’t run off thinking I’ve waited till the last minute to do this. Not even a joke: I have been working diligently at the comely backside groove on my chair by reading, searching, and notetaking more or less nonstop for the past fortnight. The all-nighter was a planned part of the opera, my plums. It always is.

The all-nighter manifested itself to me in my first year of university. September 1996: Sarah writes a paper on ‘the formation of her identity’ in a fourteen-hour marathon with a Mac Classic. (It had Star Trek software; every time I hit ‘return’ Patrick Stuart’s voice boomed, ‘MAKE IT SO.’ Even then, the computer was pretty old.) I got full marks for the essay. Admittedly, little enough research had to be done, although some pretty Deep Thoughts were required, in my seventeen-year-old estimation.

I don’t know a lot about brain chemistry, but I was euphoric throughout the next morning. At one in the afternoon, I collapsed without warning onto my notebook of doodles in Philosophy 101.

Fast-forward, oh God, three years, during which time school and the attendant ecstastic combination of Deep Thought and sleep deprivation did not remotely interest me. It was a time for drinking, reader. A time for drinking, wearing very short skirts, and writing semi-eloquent extension requests on a very regular basis. We forget this era: we set it to one side.

In was in 1999, then, rousing myself in long-awaited pursuit of my elusive and shapeshifting bachelor’s degree, that I began to seriously study the potential of the all-nighter. I had known for a while that night time was not by any requirement sleep time. I hadn’t been drinking during the day, after all: things hadn’t gotten nearly so bad as that. It was working that was new and peculiar. But working didn’t have to be odious or unpleasant, particularly following my introduction to one of the world’s best living history professors. Suddenly I was interested, but time wasn’t cooperating.

Night - the whole night - presented itself as a solution. Night holds every advantage for the young scholar: there is no traffic; the telephone doesn’t ring; and best of all, during term time the night is longer - it can begin as early as four o’clock in the afternoon. During this era I realised what a wonder it was to plan an all-nighter rather than resorting to it. Adding night to one’s schedule exposes the beauty of twenty-four hours of uninterrupted potential. All things are possible. Northern Alberta winters are particularly evocative at night: the view from your window swathed in snow, all sounds muted, a pink sky reflecting the streetlights.

But there’s a trick to it, and this is where it helps to plan. You can’t pull an all-nighter if you’ve been up continuously since eight that morning, for example. You’ll be in a torpor well before sunrise. What precedes the perfect all-nighter is a long nap (no worries about the time: you’ve got all night) followed by a good meal, a thoughtful cigarette, and a few jumping jacks.

In the early hours it’s difficult, tough to settle in. But the comfort of having all night keeps you calm. You have elected not to sleep, and as such you have Eternity in the palm of your hand. As midnight draws on you hit your stride. You find the right article, the right passage, the right word; your prose is dulcet and witty and effective without being purple or pretentious. You pause for a stretch (essential). If you’re me back in the day, you brave the snow and run across the road to the 24-hour Tim Horton’s for a vanilla cappucino or some chicken soup. Onward and upward.

The problems invariably begin at five in the morning.

The sun isn’t up yet, but five hits and you feel the magic beginning to ebb away. Time begins to run faster; it’s nearly six and you can hear the snow yielding under the wheels of the now-moving buses. Traffic has begun. The sky is turning lilac, grey, blue. The goddamned birds are out, screeching. It’s seven in the morning and the time you stole has passed through your fingers.

And you’re not done yet.

You’re still awake - the nice long nap took care of that - but you start forgetting what you were saying. Essential words are just out of reach. You’re not thinking of sleep; you’re thinking of television, of taking a bath. At this point, if you’re seasoned, you’ll jump up and down a few times and fix yourself another coffee. Just one more salvo: one more push and you’re done.

If you’re especially unlucky, you’ll finish - or give up - at ten or eleven in the morning, the sun nearing its zenith, the traffic at its height. Even in your weakened state you won’t be able to sleep without a blindfold and thick curtains, because it doesn’t matter that you’ve been up all night: you’re physically conditioned to be awake during the day, particularly at this hour. You may be a night-owl but you’re also a day-human. Unless you’ve got the trick of it - I learned eventually - going to sleep towards high noon is a bitch.

But oh, God, those hours when the moon and stars lined up and you skimmed across them to perfection - they’ll bring you back. For me, it became a way of life, and not just the night before things were due, either. They were scheduled in twice a week. Often I had somewhere to be the next day; that took focus. But it was worth it.

Now, ageing - decaying, if you will - I’m back at it. Why wouldn’t the strategy that got me through two degrees be good for a third? I can’t imagine sacrificing this time to anything as prosaic as sleep. The problem is I’m getting worse at it, which is to say I’m Growing Up and getting better at working during the day. That doesn’t mean I don’t need the all-nighter - I certainly, certainly do - but it means I’m foregoing the essential steps described above, viz. the nap and the proper meal. In my dotage I can no longer nap on command.

And between six and seven in the morning, I still start to veer off course. My mind fills - physically, it seems - with raw permutations of words, making as little sense in the book I’m reading as in the document I’m creating. The logic peculiar to a sleep-deprived sunrise makes me believe that posting about all-nighters will restore my focus. Right now, a video game feels in order. (I won’t do that. Talk about time passing quickly.)

Is it age that’s betraying me? I don’t think so. I think it’s two things: the first is memory. The truth is that it was always this way, the hours of nirvana followed by a necessary period of chugging along on fumes. Having placed the all-nighter lovingly in my Grand Narrative, I gloss over the bumpy bits.

The second is that it’s now. It’s between six and seven in the morning, witching hour. The sky is lilac now and it’s only going to get worse, and I’m not done. My night has turned into a pumpkin and I have miles to go before I sleep. But when life hands me pumpkins, I make pumpkin lattes. Time to muster up a second wind and push this old body of mine over the finish line.

The faraway voice of reason is telling me I’m going to regret this tomorrow. Today. Whenever it is.

Till next time, if God wills it, &c &c.

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1. the 24-hour clock