Regimiento de la vida (Regimen of Living)

Chapter Eight

The rule of the aforementioned fifth and sixth items, which concern going to bed and rising. It is stated and summarized from what has been said in the past, that sleep being so harmful when it is more than is suitable—the nights being long, as they are in this our climate, and particularly here, in Salonika, called by the ancients Thessaloniki, where the pole star rises on the horizon at almost forty-one degrees and when calculating the length of the day or of the night including dusk and dawn, the latter totals fourteen hours and eleven twelfths, or, in astrological terms, fifty-five minutes of the sixty that make up an hour, which is when the sun enters the first of Cancer and the first of Capricorn, as I have well calculated and verified the most accurately that I could in the book I have entitled Kaza del Dio [House of God], which is a satisfying gloss on the text of the [Sacrobosco’s] Sphere. I hope to God to soon read this to you because it is very delightful and useful for understanding many things concerning the secrets of the revolutions of the sun and of the moon; appropriate for calculating our festivals, the order of the months, the birth of the moon, and conjunctions and oppositions, and it is a science that our people have greatly praised. I have also written about [Georg] Peuerbach’s [Theoricae novae planetarum] in a work I called Puerta del Cielo [Gate of Heaven], since it seems to me that reading what I have set out in these two treatises will suffice to understand whatever relates to this science of astrology.

And returning to our purpose, I say that since here in our city the nighttime lasts a total of nearly fifteen hours, and since, excluding the twilights, it lasts about thirteen or twelve and a half hours, there is no reason that the daylight should find you in bed. Since studying done early in the morning just before dawn is the most useful—as we have said—because it is the beginning of wakefulness, when the corporeal senses have finished resting from the effort of their past exercise and remain calm without any kind of tiredness, and the vapors that rise to the brain from the stomach are already settled and purified, and a person has less impediment from the exterior things so that he does not feel any tumult that can be an obstacle to him. Everyone else is asleep; there is nothing that can harm you. Therefore, you must make every effort to be able to continue to stay awake during the small hours of the morning. I advise you as one who has long done this that it will be of greater value to you than any amount of work you may do during daylight hours. And if you follow this habit henceforth, it will become so easy for you that even though you may wish to depart from it you will not be able to, and you will flourish in excellence of knowledge and study.

And although this may seem somewhat against the rules of medicine, since all those who have written about the regimen of health say that a person should sleep in the morning until daybreak, as our master R. Moses [Maimonides] wrote in the place that I have referred to [Mishneh Torah, Book of Knowledge, Laws of Opinions 4–5], where he says that the amount of time for sleeping is eight hours, etc., and he says that these should be at the end of the night, so that it is eight hours from when one begins to sleep until the sun comes up. And since it was the intent of Maimonides in the aforesaid book to give a regimen for the health of the body corresponding to the rule of medicine, he did not exceed what is fitting to maintain health. But since it is our main intent here to look for the best and surest way to effect the true well-being, we seek the lesser ill—which we deem preferable to the greater ill—which is the deprivation of study at such a time which, in my view, cannot possibly be restored, at which detriment to health is avoided easily with the habit that becomes second nature.

Consequently, it seems to me that on no account must you leave off doing it because of the benefits that arise from it in conformity with the saying of our very holy King David who says in his Psalms (63:7) in the night-watches I shall meditate upon Thee, etc., which means that having the recollection of sacred matters in his bed early in the morning, he must speak of them, and for this same reason he said at midnight I shall get up to give thanks to Thee, etc. (Psalms 119:62), demonstrating the excellence of study from midnight onward, for the aforesaid reasons.

And when you go to bed you should also be warned not to go to bed straight after eating, because this attracts many harms to the body—according to what has been written by all those who treat the regimen of health—and no benefit shall befall the soul but much harm, because it distends the stomach with bad humors that harm the brain and alter its constitution, and with this the understanding becomes confused. Consequently, a person should consider this very carefully, since although it may not be as severe as the physicians say and although the harm may not even be evident, it is a sufficient reason for one to stay awake one hour after the evening meal, and the doctors recommended for this a good precept about which Avicenna wrote in the Canon of Medicine I.III.2.7, saying that Rufus, an illustrious doctor, praised taking a walk after the meal, etc. Assuredly it is a good precept, and all should become accustomed to it, so that after having walked, following the meal, for a moderate length of time, half an hour or a bit more, they will be able to sleep without any harmful effects.