Sleep and Time (VN Diary No. 24)

Slept badly last night. Actually, didn’t sleep much at all.. Drank an espresso in the late afternoon and it kept me up until nearly four this morning. It didn’t help that the clock in the St. Joseph’s bell tower tolls on the quarter hour. The bell itself is not robust — not the big French casting one would imagine given the history of the church. Instead, I imagine one of those large Chinese gongs with a knob in the center and some kind of Soviet-era mechanical device that brings a hammer down on it. To make it even more difficult for the sleeper, sometimes the bell tolls once, sometimes twice and occasionally three times at each quarter hour, without apparent pattern. The first couple of nights I was here, jet-lagged, I thought the hour got three bells, the half hour two and the quarters one each, but that is not the case I discovered last night. Like so many things here, the order, if there is an order, is not apparent, appearing random, capricious.