I’m working on a short ebook on my early morning practice and how it illustrates the way I combine work and rest, and (via Roger Ekirch’s classic work on biphasic sleep in early modern England) came across Samuel Johnson’s 1732 “Adventurer Essay No. 39, “On Sleep.” Johnson wonders “why so liberal and impartial a benefactor as sleep, should meet with so few historians or panegyrists:”

Writers are so totally absorbed by the business of the day, as never to turn their attention to that power, whose officious hand so seasonably suspends the burden of life; and without whose interposition man would not be able to endure the fatigue of labour, however rewarded, or the struggle with opposition, however successful.

I hear you, Johnson. I hear you!

After discussing the role of sleep in the lives of peasants, princes, and poets, he then connects restorative sleep to virtue and hard work:

Sleep, therefore, as the chief of all earthly blessings, is justly appropriated to industry and temperance; the refreshing rest, and the peaceful night, are the portion only of him who lies down weary with honest labour, and free from the fumes of indigested luxury; it is the just doom of laziness and gluttony, to be inactive without ease, and drowsy without tranquillity.

Once again, we see a connection between depth of work and value of rest: just as I argue in my book, Johnson is arguing that we should see the quality of rest and work as connected, each reinforcing and supporting the other.