Summary
Title: Lying Awake
Author: Mark Salzman
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0375706062
Pro:
• Fascinating exploration of the nature of faith and mystical visions
• Presents the very difficult choice that would be hard on most people
Con:
• None
Description:
• Novel about a cloistered nun who experiences visions of God, but who has temporal-lobe epilepsy
• If the nun is operated upon, the visions will stop - and so will her poetry, which brings in funds
• How can the nun decide what to do: become healthy and give up God or risk death for God?
Book Review
Now, however, she experiences intense visions and has even published a book of poetry based on those visions. Her work has made her feel special and allows her to financially help her monastery. But her sisters, worried about her headaches, send her to be checked by a doctor, who finds the she suffers from a sort of temporal-lobe epilepsy commonly brings about “hypergraphia (voluminous writing), an intensification but also a narrowing of emotional response, and an obsessive interest in religion and philosophy.”
A number of writers and philosophers have suffered from this. One of the most famous was Dostoeyevsky, and his comments are quoted in the book: “There are moments, and it is only a matter of five or six seconds, when you feel the presence of eternal harmony.... If this state were to last more than five seconds, the soul could not endure it and would have to disappear.”
So what is Sister John to do? If she goes ahead with the surgery, she will end the devastating headaches which accompany her visions, but she may end the visions themselves — thus eliminating the connection to God which she has sought for so long. But if she clings to her current condition, she must endure not only the physical pain, but endure the knowledge that her visions may be nothing more than a neuro-chemical imbalance.
Salzman addresses many issues in his short novel. First, there is the life of cloistered nuns to contemporary Los Angeles — their squabbles, their joys, and the austerity of their lives. Then, there is the nature of a spiritual life, and whether or not the quest for contact with God happens for selfish or selfless reasons. Next is the nature of artistic inspiration — does the best art really depend upon a type of disease or madness? Finally, there is the question of all mystical and religious experience — does it point to God, or just to ourselves?
