Asleep?

Yesterday's second reading from 1 Thes 5 ends:

"Therefore, let us not sleep as the rest do,
but let us stay alert and sober."

How does one stay awake, alert and sober?

Levinas has some advice:

"Q.: Let us imagine, EL, that a student who is about to graduate were to ask your definition of philosophy. What would you tell him?

E.L.: I would say to him that philosophy permits man to interrogate himself about what he says and about what one says to oneself in thinking. No longer to let oneself be swayed or intoxicated by the rhythm of words and the generality that they designate. but to open oneself to the uniqueness of the unique in the real, that is to say, to the uniqueness of the other. That is to say, in the final analysis, to love. To speak truly, not as one sings; to awaken; to sober up; to undo one's refrain. Already the philosopher Alain taught us to be on guard against everything that in our purportedly lucid civilization comes to us from the 'merchants of sleep.' Philosophy as insomnia, as a new awakening at the heart of the self-evidence which already marks the awakening, but which is still or always a dream.

Q.: Is it important to have insomnia?

E.L.: Awakening is, I believe, that which is proper to man. The search, on the part of the one who has been awakened, for a new sobering, more profound, philosophical. The encounter with texts which result from the conversations between Socrates and his interlocutors calls us to wake up, but so too does the encounter with the other man.

Q.: Is it the otther who renders one a philosopher?

E.L.: In a certain sense. The encounter with the other is the great experience, the grand event. The encounter with the other is not reducible to the acquisition of a supplementary knowledge. Certainly I can never totally grasp the other, but the responsibility on his behalf -- in which language originates -- and the sociality with him goes beyond knowledge, even if our Greek ancestors were circumspect on this point.

Q.: We live in a society of the image, of sound, of the spectacle, in which there is little place for a step back, for reflection. If this were to accelerate, would not our society lose humanity?

E.L.: Absolutely. I have no nostalgia for the primitive. Whatever be the human possibilities that appear there -- they must be stated. Though there is a danger of verbalism, language, which is a call to the other, is also the essential modality of the 'self-distrust' that is proper to philosophy. I don't wish to denounce the image. But I contend that in the audiovisual domain there is considerable distraction. It is a form of dreaming which plunges us into and maintains the sleep of which we were just talking."

From Is It Righteous To Be, pp. 234-35.

Listen to Bach's Sleepers Awake.

Same, Switched On

Same, Swingle Singers.

And when we wake up?
Otis Redding: Try a Little Tenderness