Love & Passion Quote by Evelyn Waugh

Insomnia becomes a social performance in Waugh's hands: a condition so absurd it loops back into etiquette. The line snaps shut like a well-made trap. You expect confession, maybe a little vulnerability, and instead you get a comedy of inverted logic: if you can't sleep, you must "rest" even more. It's the kind of reasoning that sounds airtight for half a second, then exposes the brittle mechanics of how people rationalize their own dysfunctions.

Waugh's intent isn't to document a medical complaint; it's to skewer the cultivated self-mythology of the tired, overcivilized modern. "I go to bed early" reads like virtue, a nod to discipline and good habits. Then he detonates it. Bedtime becomes not health but camouflage, a way to occupy the socially legible position of someone who is responsible, even while privately falling apart. The joke lands because it targets a very specific hypocrisy: we love the aesthetics of wellness more than the reality of it.

There's also a class-coded brittleness here. Waugh's comic world is full of people who keep up appearances while their inner lives rot in plain sight. The epigrammatic polish mimics the manners he’s mocking: crisp, controlled, faintly cruel. If you can turn sleeplessness into a neat paradox, you can keep the mess at arm's length - and keep everyone else from asking the wrong questions.