Art & Creativity Quote by Harold H. Greene

Insomnia becomes a production line here, and the punchline is that everyone around him is complicit. Greene frames sleeplessness not as fragility but as fuel: if he can’t return to sleep, he returns to work. The simple rhythm of the sentences mirrors the habit he’s describing - wake, descend, write - like a private ritual that turns a restless body into a functioning institution.

The slyest move is the staff’s betting pool. It’s funny, but it’s also an index of power and expectation. A judge’s authority isn’t just in the courtroom; it radiates into the clerks’ office, where people organize their day around the unpredictable output of one insomniac mind. The pool makes the workload legible, almost gamified, a way for staff to domesticate the anxiety of whatever tomorrow’s stack of pages will demand. Humor becomes coping, and also a kind of admiration: you don’t bet on someone unless they reliably perform.

Context matters: judges, especially in busy courts, live inside paperwork - opinions, memos, orders - that carry real consequences for lives and institutions. Greene’s anecdote quietly asserts seriousness without self-congratulation. He doesn’t say he was brilliant; he says he was up. The subtext is a particular ethic of legitimacy: the law is not only argued in public, it’s manufactured at 3 a.m., in solitude, by someone whose rest is perpetually deferred.