One thing we can and must not fail to do: we can learn to understand and
appreciate Rest. In particular, we should build up and reinforce the
powers of the night to offset this new intensity of the day. Such,
indeed, as the day now is has it ever been, though in a less degree:
always it has cast upon men impressions significant, insignificant, and
of an ill significance, promiscuously and in excess; and always sleep
has been the filter of memory, the purifier of experience, providing a
season that follows closely upon the impressions of the day, ere yet
they are too deeply imbedded, in which our deeper life may pluck away
the adhering burrs from its garments, and arise disburdened, clean, and
free. I make no doubt that Death also performs, though in an ampler and
more thorough way, the same functions. It opposes the tyranny of memory.
For were our experience to go on forever accumulating, unwinnowed,
undiminished, every man would sooner or later break down beneath it;
every man would be crushed by his own traditions, becoming a grave to
himself, and drawing the clods over his own head. To relieve us of these
accidental accretions, to give us back to ourselves, is the use,
in part, of that sleep which rounds each day, and of that other
sleep--brief, but how deep!--which rounds each human life.

Accordingly, he who sleeps well need not die so soon,--even as in the
order of Nature he will not. He has that other and rarer half of a good
memory, namely, a good forgetting. For none remembers so ill as he that
remembers all. "A great German scholar affirmed that he knew not what
it was to forget." Better have been born an idiot! An unwashed
memory,--faugh! To us moderns and Americans, therefore, who need
above all things to forget well,--our one imperative want being a
simplification of experience,--to us, more than to all other men, is
requisite, in large measure of benefit, the winnowing-fan of sleep,