ld give me pain, as it would counteract
my internal disposition.' Let the world go hang; our internal
disposition is to stay in bed: we cling tenaciously to non-existence--or
rather, to that third state of consciousness when we are in the world
but not of it.

There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something better
to do than waste their time wondering why they like to stay in bed,
which they don't. They are persons who have never been bored by the
monotony of dressing or have tried to vary it, sometimes beginning at
one end, sometimes at the other, but always defeated by the hard fact
that a man cannot button his collar until he has put on his shirt. If
they condescend so far, they will say, with some truth, that it is a
question of weather, and any fool knows that it is not pleasant to get
out of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. The matter has been considered
from that angle. 'I have been warm all night,' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'and
find myself in a state perfectly suited to a warm-blooded animal. To get
out of this state into the cold, besides the inharmonious and uncritical
abruptness of the transition, is so unnatural to such a creature that
the poets, refining upon the tortures of the damned, make one of their
greatest agonies consist in being suddenly transported from heat to
cold--from fire to ice. They are "haled" out of their "beds," says
Milton, by "harpy-footed furies"--fellows who come to call them.'

But no man, say I, or woman either, ever lay in bed and devised logical
reasons for staying there--unless for the purposes of an essay, in which
case the recumbent essayist, snuggle as he may, is mentally up and
dressed. He is really awake. He has tied his necktie. He is a busy
bee--and I can no more imagine a busy bee lying in bed than I can
imagine lying in bed with one. He is no longer in the nice balance
between sense and oblivion that is too serenely and irresponsibly
comfortable to be consciously analyzed; and in which, so long as he can
stay there without getting wider awake, nothing else matters.

Lying in bed being a half-way house between sleeping and waking, and the
mind then equally indifferent to logic and exact realism, the lier in
bed can and does create his own dreams: it is an inexpensive and
gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me:
Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs
the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask