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~ Posted by Robert Butler, November 14th 2013

When Anthony Gardner attended an evening class for us last week on how to sleep better, he discovered there were four basic rules. He wasn't the only one keen to learn what they were: the class itself was very well attended and his blogpost was the most-read article on this site.

I was ready to follow his advice and when I woke at two this morning I remembered there was no listening to the radio, no switching on the computer, and no checking the phone. Instead I reached for a collection of short stories and picked the one which sounded as if it would be the least stimulating.

Chekhov's "A Boring Story" deals with the teeming, raw and uncharitable thoughts of Nikolai Stepanovich, an eminent professor and privy counsel, who at the age of 62 senses his approaching death. "As regards my present life," he tells us on the second page, "I must first of all mention the insomnia from which I have begun to suffer lately." This, he says, is the "chief and fundamental fact" of his existence.

The physical details in the story belong to the late 19th century, but his experience would be familiar to anyone attending the how-to-sleep class. There is the slow passage of time—"the clock in the corridor strikes one, then two, then three"—as Nikolai waits for the cock to crow and the first glimpse of light beyond the window. There are the sounds of the night—the creak of the wardrobe's warped wood and the unexpected hum of the wick in the lamp—which carry an excitement of their own. There are the mental games that Nikolai plays to get to sleep: counting to a thousand or trying to picture the face of a colleague and recall the year he joined the faculty. And, lastly, there's the relentlessness of it all: "tomorrow and the day after tomorrow the nights will be just as long."

The 58 pages were not nearly boring enough. After finishing it, I lay awake wondering if there was a better fictional account of not getting a good night's sleep.

Robert Butler is online editor of Intelligent Life

Image Getty

Rebecca Willis Applied Fashion

Smokey eyes and red, red lips - in the world of make-up, even angels have dirty faces

Ngay cả thiên thần thì cũng có mặt dơ!

Note: Bài này thú nhất, trong số báo.
Đúng ra TV phải có mục này từ lâu rồi!
“Applied Fashion” [Mốt ứng dụng, đưa vô thực hành].

Có những câu thật tuyệt:

The world we live in is literally written on our bodies. Thế giới chúng ta sống được viết trên cơ thể bạn.
It is not a coincidence that "made up" means pretend. Không phải là tình cờ khi "made up", “trang điểm”, có nghĩa là “giả đò”.
No wonder early feminists went bare-faced. Đâu có gì là ngạc nhiên, khi phụ nữ ngày xưa [những phụ nữ đòi nữ quyền, hồi mới đầu] đi, mặt không trang điểm , "bare faced", Mít kêu là "mặt mộc".
It always seemed odd: as a child you're told to keep your face clean, and then suddenly as a grown-up you're encouraged to put dirt on it.
Cũng thật kỳ cục, khi còn bé, đám con gái chúng ta lúc nào cũng bị/được căn dặn, phải giữ bộ mặt sạch, khi lớn lên, lại cố làm cho nó dơ đi!

Nhưng đâu chỉ bộ mặt!

Hà, hà!

RECENTLY I WENT to a party as a panda. It wasn't fancy dress - I just put on too much of a new, smudgy eyeliner that I'd never used before. Special occasions prompt us to want to look our best, and make-up, like clothes, offers the chance to choose what that might be. But where on the spectrum from natural to mask-like artificiality do we want to sit? And even if we know, how do we achieve it when there are acres of products on the shelves and we have less than a square foot of face on which to put it?

After the panda incident, I decided to get to grips with makeup, in theory and in practice. While I wear moisturizer daily, eyeliner often and lipstick sometimes, I have never made the transition to foundation or any sort of whole-face make- up. It always seemed odd: as a child you're told to keep your face clean, then suddenly as a grown-up you're encouraged to put dirt on it. I hate the feeling of having my face covered in gunk which gets on my clothes and my phone, and I dislike planting a kiss on a cheek clammy with what the industry calls "product". The occasional quick swish of compact powder on a sponge moistened with water is as far as I go. There are lots of ways to learn how to apply dirt to your face. The internet is full of make- up tutorials, posted both by big companies such as L'Oreal and by individual women who just adore make-up and treat it with a high seriousness (see feature, page 70). Online, I discovered how to find my eye's "outer V"- it starts at the corner, heads for the outer edge of the brow, then turns inwards when it meets the eyelid fold - and also that dabbing on eye shadow is better than swiping it, which removes as much color as it applies. Offline, I went for a lesson at a department store. Hoping to avoid any more party make-up malfunctions, I chose the one called "smokey eye": in fashion-speak, eyes, like shoes and trousers, go into the singular. I picked up some tips, such as using the side of an eyeliner brush to get close to my lashes, and how to do a flick in the corner of the eye (rather than go freehand, you continue an imaginary line upwards from the lower lid). But after two coats of mascara, which I don't normally wear, my eyelids felt they were weightlifting. I went home, heard the verdict - "too much" (son); "it makes you look old" (husband) - then ran upstairs, took it all off, and felt like myself again. It is not a coincidence that "made up" means pretend.

Why wear make-up in the first place? The urge to paint ourselves is millennia old: the ancient Egyptians had kohl, the ancient Britons woad. Jezebel is on record in the Old Testament as making up her eyelids; Elizabeth I and the Kabuki dancers of Japan slathered their faces with white lead; native Americans and other tribal cultures decorated themselves with bands of color before a battle. Today it is part of our culture to paint ourselves before a different sort of encounter: a social one. The expression "war paint" is an apt one.

In her fascinating book "Bodies" (Profile Books), Susie Orbach describes how the culture we live in determines the marks we make - or "inscribe" - on ourselves. The world we live in is literally written on our bodies. The objective of make-up nowadays seems to be to mimic the smooth, even-toned skin of youth, and, to quote make-up artists and shop assistants, to "open up the eye" (singular). They all talk about opening up the eye; this is not a surgical procedure, thank goodness, but seems to mean making it look brighter and above all bigger.

No one could tell me why that should be so desirable. Then I read that the distance between eyeball and eyebrow is a key factor in gender perception, and is much greater in women than men. To enlarge that distance is to exaggerate your femininity.

And when the eye itself is widened it is a sign of submission, so opening up the eye makes us kittenishly vulnerable. No wonder early feminists went bare-faced. Narrowing my eyes, I picked up a book on body language. "The use of lipstick", it read, "is a technique thousands of years old that is intended to mimic the reddened genitals of the sexually aroused female." Was ever a sentence more likely to give you pause before whipping a stick of Chanel's Rouge Allure out of your handbag? We might just want to reflect a moment on these things before we hand over the contents of our wallets to the billion-dollar cosmetic industry, and slap our purchases, in the name of improvement, onto our party-going faces .•