Short sleepers cruise by on four to six hours a night and don’t seem to suffer ill effects Everyone has heard that it’s vital to get seven to nine hours of sleep a night, a recommendation repeated so often it has become gospel. Get anything less, and you are more likely to suffer from poor health in the short and long term—memory problems, metabolic issues, depression, dementia, heart disease, a weakened immune system. But in recent years, scientists have discovered a rare breed who consistently get little shut-eye and are no worse for wear. Natural short sleepers, as they are called, are genetically wired to need only four to six hours of sleep a night. These outliers suggest that quality, not quantity, is what matters. If scientists could figure out what these people do differently it might, they hope, provide insight into sleep’s very nature. “The bottom line is, we don’t understand what sleep is, let alone what it’s for. That’s pretty incredible, given that the average person sleeps a third of their lives,” says Louis Ptáček, a neurologist at the University of California, San Francisco. Scientists once thought sleep was little more than a period of rest, like powering down a computer in preparation for the next day’s work. Thomas Edison called sleep a waste of time—“a heritage from our cave days”—and claimed to never sleep more than four hours a night. His invention of the incandescent lightbulb encouraged shorter sleep times in others. Today, a historically high number of U.S. adults are sleeping less than five hours a night. But modern sleep research has shown that sleep is an active, complicated process we don’t necessarily want to cut short. During sleep, scientists suspect that our bodies and brains are replenishing energy stores, flushing waste and toxins, pruning synapses and consolidating memories. As a result, chronic sleep deprivation can have serious health consequences. Most of what we know about sleep and sleep deprivation stems from a model proposed in the 1970s by a Hungarian Swiss researcher named Alexander Borbély. His two-process model of sleep describes how separate systems—circadian rhythm and sleep homeostasis—interact to govern when and how long we sleep. The circadian clock dictates the 24-hour cycle of sleep and wakefulness, guided by external cues like light and darkness. Sleep homeostasis, on the other hand, is driven by internal pressure that builds while you’re awake and decreases while you’re asleep, ebbing and flowing like hunger. There’s variation in these patterns. “We’ve always known that there are morning larks and night owls, but most people fall in between. We’ve always known there are short sleepers and long sleepers, but most people fall in between,” says Ptáček. “They’ve been out there, but the reason that they haven’t been recognized is that these people generally don’t go to doctors.” That changed when Ptáček and his colleague Ying-Hui Fu, a human geneticist and neuroscientist at the University of California, San Francisco, were introduced to a woman who felt that her early sleep schedule was a curse. The woman naturally woke up in the wee hours of the morning, when it was “cold, dark and lonely.” Her granddaughters inherited her same sleep habits. The researchers pinpointed the genetic mutation for this rare type of morning lark, and after they published their findings, thousands of extreme early risers came out of the woodwork. But Fu recalls being intrigued by one family who didn’t fit the pattern. These family members woke up early but didn’t go to bed early, and they felt refreshed after only about six hours of sleep. They were the first people identified with familial natural short sleep, a condition that runs in families like other genetic traits. Fu and Ptáček traced their abbreviated slumber to a mutation in a gene called DEC2. The researchers went on to genetically engineer the DEC2 mutation into mice, showing that the animals need less sleep than their littermates. And they found that one of the gene’s jobs is to help control levels of a brain hormone called orexin, which promotes wakefulness. Interestingly, orexin deficiency is a leading cause of narcolepsy, a sleep disorder marked by episodes of excessive daytime sleepiness. In people with short sleep, however, orexin production appears to be increased. Over time, the team has identified seven genes associated with natural short sleep. In one family with three generations of short sleepers, the researchers found a mutation in a gene called ADRB1, which is highly active in a region of the brain stem, the dorsal pons, that’s involved in regulating sleep. When the scientists used a technique to stimulate that brain region in mice, rousing them from their sleep, mice with the ADRB1 mutation woke more easily and stayed awake longer. In a father-son pair of short sleepers, the researchers identified a mutation in another gene, NPSR1, which is involved in regulating the sleep-wake cycle. When they created mice with the same mutation, they found that the animals spent less time sleeping and, in behavioral tests, lacked the memory problems that typically follow a short night’s sleep. The team also found two distinct mutations in a gene called GRM1, in two unrelated families with shortened sleep cycles. Again, mice engineered with those mutations slept less, with no obvious health consequences. Like mice, people who are naturally short sleepers seem to be immune to the ill effects of sleep deprivation. If anything, they do extraordinarily well. Research suggests that such people are ambitious, energetic and optimistic, with remarkable resilience against stress and higher thresholds for pain. They might even live longer. Based on the findings in short sleepers, some researchers think it may be time to update the old two-process model of sleep, which is how Ptáček developed the idea of a third influence. The updated model might unfold like this: In the morning, the circadian clock indicates it is time to start your day, and sleep homeostasis signals you’ve gotten enough sleep to get out of bed. Then a third factor—behavioral drive—compels you to go out and do your job, or find a mate, or gather sustenance. At night, the process goes in reverse, to calm the body down for sleep. Perhaps short sleepers are so driven that they are able to overcome the innate processes that keep others in bed. But it may also be that, somehow, the brains of short sleepers are built to sleep so efficiently that they are able to do more with less. “It’s not like there’s something magical about your seven to eight hours,” says Phyllis Zee, director of the Center for Circadian and Sleep Medicine at Northwestern University. Zee can imagine countless ways that short sleepers’ brains could be more efficient. Do they have more slow-wave sleep, the most restorative sleep stage? Do they generate higher amounts of cerebrospinal fluid, the liquid that bathes the brain and spinal cord, enabling them to get rid of more waste products? Is their metabolic rate different, helping them cycle in and out of sleep more quickly? “It’s all about efficiency, sleep efficiency—that’s how I feel,” says Fu. “Whatever their body needs to do with sleep, they can get it done in a short time.” Recent studies from Fu and Ptáček suggest that naturally short sleepers may be more efficient at removing toxic brain aggregates that contribute to neurodegenerative disorders like Alzheimer’s disease. The researchers bred mice that had short sleep genes with mice that carried genes predisposing them to Alzheimer’s. The Alzheimer’s mice developed a buildup of abnormal proteins—amyloid plaques and tau tangles—that, in humans, are hallmarks of dementia. But the brains of the hybrid mice developed fewer of these tangles and plaques, as if the sleep mutations were protecting the animals. Fu believes that if she conducted similar studies in models of heart disease, diabetes or other illnesses associated with sleep deprivation, she would get similar results. It isn’t yet clear how the short sleeper genes identified thus far shield people from the ill effects of poor sleep, or how the mutations in these genes make sleep more efficient. To get at the answer, Fu and Ptáček started bringing short sleepers to their joint laboratory to measure their brain waves while they slept. Their sleep study was derailed by the Covid-19 pandemic, but they are eager to get it back on track. The researchers are also interested in understanding other sleep outliers. Sleep duration, like most behaviors, follows a bell curve. Short sleepers sit on one end of the curve, long sleepers on the other. Fu has found one genetic mutation associated with long sleep, but long sleepers are challenging to study because their schedules don’t align with the norms and demands of society. Long sleepers are often forced to get up early to go to school or work, which can result in sleep deprivation and may contribute to depression and other illnesses. But though sleep has a strong genetic component, it can also be shaped by the environment. Knowing that better sleep is possible, and understanding the basis, could point the way to interventions to optimize sleep, enabling more people to live longer, healthier lives. Zee’s lab, for example, has tinkered with using acoustic stimulation to boost the slow waves of deep sleep that enhance memory processing and may be one of the secrets to short sleepers’ success. In a study, they played pink noise—a softer, more natural sound than white noise, more akin to rain or the ocean—while study participants slept. The next day those participants remembered more in a test of learning and recalling word pairs. “We can enhance memory, but we’re not making them sleep longer or necessarily shorter,” says Zee. “I think there’s a lot more to learn.” For now, researchers recommend that people focus on getting the amount of sleep they need, recognizing it will be different for different people. Ptáček still bristles when he hears someone preach that everybody has to sleep eight hours a night. “That's like saying everybody in the population has to be 5 foot 10,” he says. “That's not how genetics works.” Source of the article

A recent study suggests huge volumes of the molecule emerged during the cosmic dawn Do us a favor: take a sip of water. Done it? Good. You probably needed rehydrating, but more importantly, I need to tell you something about the universe. Did you know that some of those water molecules were filtered through the trunk of an ancient tree that grew on Antarctica long before any ice covered it? Those same molecules were also once stolen by a plant that graced a hilltop on a planet that had yet to see a single flower. Before that, a mighty dinosaur drank from a pool that was once home to at least one of those molecules of water. The very first form of life, a microbe of some sort, may have been wriggling about on an effervescing hydrothermal vent as that molecule drifted through the abyssal depths of a long-forgotten sea. And billions of years ago, icy comets and soggy asteroids delivered that water molecule—and so many more like it—to a young world named Earth. But where did all that water originally come from? Most of the matter we interact with, made from plenty of the elements on the periodic table, was forged in the cataclysmic final seconds of countless stars that had exhausted their supplies of nuclear fuel. Hydrogen and oxygen, the two atomic components of common water, aren’t rare—and after enough stars had died in our corner of the Milky Way, it’d have a decent supply of water. But how old could some of that water be? Where, and when, did the very first droplets of water in the history of the universe form? Telescopes looking at the farthest reaches of space have found that abundances of water existed less than two billion years after the Big Bang. But a recent study, published in the journal Nature Astronomy, suggests something rather explosive: Water may have been present as early as 100 million to 200 million years after the universe came to be. According to the authors’ simulations, huge volumes of it were formed very close to, or at, cosmic dawn—the moment the very first generation of stars set the dark skies ablaze with light. It's difficult to overstate just how surprisingly early to the party this water may have been. “This suggests that water, the primary ingredient for life, existed even before the building blocks of our own galaxy were formed,” says Muhammad Latif, an astrophysicist at the United Arab Emirates University, and one of the study’s authors. There are some major caveats to this research. The team didn’t detect this ancient water; they used simulations of an as-yet-unseen type of star to understand how early on that water could have formed under certain conditions. But thanks to the high fidelity of these simulations, if these primordial stars were around at cosmic dawn, then this is probably how they would have died—with a bang, and a splash. “The simulations are state-of-the-art. So yes, the results are reliable and believable,” says Mike Norman, a physicist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not involved with the new research. And if these virtual recreations of stellar self-destruction are windows into the very distant past, then that might also mean our own waterlogged, paradisiacal world is just one in a considerably long line of oceanic planets. “The dense water cores are potential hosts of proto-planetary disks which may even lead to habitable planets forming at cosmic dawn,” says Latif. “In nutshell, life could have originated much earlier than previously thought.” The cosmos is built by chaos. Stars inevitably die, in a variety of spectacular ways, and in doing so create then scatter a multitude of elements out into space. The most violent of these deaths are associated with truly giant stars and are known as supernovas—explosions that sometimes outshine entire galaxies. Sometimes these stars simply burn through all their internal fuel reserves and implode under their own immense gravity. Other times, a voracious star eats too much of a companion star nearby and gives itself a destructive bout of thermonuclear indigestion. Either way, supernovas produce a bevy of elements, from the lighter common ones to the rarer heavier ones. As I write this, I find myself glancing at my wedding ring. It’s made of tantalum, a blueish-silver metal. It may have been mined somewhere on Earth in the not-too-distant past, but originally, it was molded in the heart of an expiring star—either a smaller one that had ballooned into a red giant or a giant crucible that ignited into a supernova. That ring may be a symbol of affection in the extreme, but it’s also the shiny wreckage of a cosmic lighthouse. Water is also a byproduct of star death, but comparing it to something like tantalum might seem odd. After all, water is pretty much everywhere we look, from Earth’s oceans to the solar system’s myriad icy moons, all the way out to distant planets orbiting alien stars. In today’s universe, forming water is also quite easy: All one needs to stick two run-of-the-mill hydrogen atoms to one oxygen atom in a sufficiently cold patch of an already frigid universe. But it wasn’t always so effortless to keep the cosmos hydrated. Unless you formed a lot of water everywhere all at once, cosmic radiation and the high temperature conditions around exploding stars would threaten to disintegrate all those water molecules long before any seas had a chance at forming. Along with his colleagues, Latif was curious: When, exactly, was water first able to emerge? Naturally, their thoughts turned to the very first furnaces in the universe. Around 400,000 years after the Big Bang, the first hydrogen and helium atoms popped up before being sucked into pockets of so-called dark matter. Once in those pockets, those atoms were squashed by gravity. Eventually, they were so thoroughly compressed that nuclear fusion got going—and boom, the very first stars lit up the universe. Astronomers have decided to give these primordial stars a counterintuitive name: Population III stars. Population II stars are the descendants of Population III stars, crafted from their detritus, while newcomers like our sun are known as Population I stars. They may have a bit of silly name, but Population III stars are remarkably important. As Latif and his colleagues write in their recent study, these stars, and their supernovas, “were the first nucleosynthetic engines in the universe, and they forged the heavy elements required for the later formation of planets and life.” These stars were supermassive, and they burned brightly and swiftly; they existed for just a few million years—not billions of years, like many contemporary stars—before blowing themselves to smithereens. A notable point of contention is that Population III stars are theoretical. Even the almighty James Webb Space Telescope, which can see farther out in space—and further back in time—than any other observatory, has yet to see any clear evidence (direct or indirect) of a Population III star. Perhaps one day it will. Perhaps it won’t. But the astronomical community suspects that these primordial stars, or something very similar to them, do exist at cosmic dawn. This means that, as they try to hunt them down, astrophysicists enjoy using computers to simulate their births and deaths—and what the consequences of this life cycle may be. This recent study, which does just that, studied two theoretical Population III stars: one 13 times as massive as the sun, and one 200 times as massive. The smaller star burned for just 12.2 million years, while the gigantic one persisted for just 2.6 million years, explains Daniel Whalen, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in England and one of the new study’s authors. Both ended their lives spectacularly, via two slightly different types of supernova. A hail of blinding light was followed by a halo of debris rocketing out in all directions. At first, both halos were remarkably hot—too hot for the oxygen and the hydrogen to mix. “Gas needs to be cooled down first before water can form,” says Latif. Instead, all this matter spent several million years flying out into the darkness. But after a while—two million to three million years for the gigantic star’s supernova, and 30 million years for the smaller supernova—the debris halo became sufficiently chilled. The halo’s outward expansion experienced some turbulence, creating swirls that gathered mass, creating gravitational traps that drew in even more mass over time. The oxygen and hydrogen in those dense, cold traps were then able to bond—and water began to precipitate. If all the water from the smaller supernova were weighed, it would be equivalent to one-third of the Earth’s total mass. The gigantic supernova, which ejected far more hydrogen and oxygen, created a staggering 330 Earth-masses worth of water. These simulations—whose stills represent resplendent, van Gogh-like works-in-progress—are elegant. “The results are not surprising; in fact, they are to be expected. As soon as Pop III supernovae give you heavy elements, all sorts of molecules start to form in cool dense gas,” says Norman. Making multiple worlds’ worth of water would have been incredibly easy for these fast and furious stars. Plenty of uncertainty remains, though. The typical mass of a Population III star is not yet known, which would affect their ability to manufacture water. And, lest we forget, nobody has yet scoped a Population III star. “Simulations that make predictions without having any observations to benchmark the models against are always difficult to fully trust. Slight tweaks to the implementation of the model could give you very different results,” says Renske Smit, an astrophysicist at England’s Liverpool John Moores University who was not involved with the new research. “That being said, we know that dust forms very rapidly from observations around 800 million years after the Big Bang, so it’s not difficult to believe water could form very early as well.” In other words: This result is big, if true. But if it is true, the consequences for the cosmos could be remarkable. These primordial stars didn’t just create a lot of water; they also released a lot of silicon, which binds with oxygen to form a very commonplace rock. In another study—currently a preprint awaiting peer review—by the same team, models show that, just over 200 million years after the Big Bang, in the ruins of the very first stars, planets were piecing themselves together around a second generation of stellar furnaces. And those planets had access to plenty of fresh water—water that had several routes to reach them, from comet and asteroid impacts to icy dust being imprisoned within the planets as they were being built. Just think about that for a moment. Just a few heartbeats after the beginning of everything, of both space and time, there may have been water worlds gliding around, long before there were even enough stars to form galaxies. If life took root on those oceanic worlds, and it were able to gaze upward, it would have seen a night sky staggeringly different from our own diamantine vista. None of those primeval planets exists today. Eventually, their own stars would have died, immolating or jettisoning them in the process. Much of the water forged by those original supernovas would have been broken down and destroyed, split into its constituent atoms. And each subsequent generation of planets, and stars, would have their own water recycled from the seas of their ancestors. There is, however, a possibility that some of the very first water ever made, by those impossibly ancient Population III stars, is still around today. Some may be floating out in the middle of nowhere. Some may be swept up in the creation of far-flung planets. Not too long ago, I was outside, it was raining, and several droplets fell on my hand and trickled across my wedding ring. At that moment, a humbling thought popped into my mind. I bought that tantalum ring in 2024. That tantalum fell from space 4.6 billion years ago, along with much of Earth’s water. Those raindrops were fresh—but maybe, just maybe, a single drop contained one solitary molecule of water that was formed in the explosive final moments of a star that lived 13.6 billion years ago. Who knows? Perhaps the next time you’re out in the rain, the memory of a star from cosmic dawn will fall on you, too. Source of the article

Condemned to death by firing squad, French resistance fighters put pen to paper. Their dying words can teach us how to live On a wintry day in Bordeaux, France, I took refuge from the rain inside a cosy bookshop stacked to the ceiling with books. Place Gambetta, Bordeaux’s iconic square framed with majestic 18th-century limestone façades, was under construction. ‘It’s always like this,’ the owner told me with a disparaging glare. I was not sure if the comment was directed at the rain or the construction. Inside, I browsed the shelves, soaking in the titles one by one. A book cast among thousands caught my eye: La vie à en mourir: lettres de fusillés (2003). It contained farewell letters of those shot by Nazi firing squads during the German occupation of France in the Second World War. I picked it up, opening the pages slowly and carefully as if I held in my hands a fragile treasure, like ‘this butterfly wing’ which the 19-year-old Robert Busillet, executed for his role in an intelligence-gathering and sabotage network, bequeathed to his mother ‘en souvenir de moi’, to remember him by. I flitted through the pages, reading flashes of a letter here, longer passages there. As someone who studies war, I am no stranger to the theme of killing and dying. But this experience was different. Last letters are unlike any other type of writing I have ever encountered. They are of a singular ilk because they peer into the souls of those confronting imminent and inescapable death. Different from everyday letters, diaries, memoirs, political tracts or philosophical treatises, because of the urgency that shapes the act of writing. The authors know there will not be another chance to say what must be said. Each last letter is uniquely personal, yet there is a universal feel to them, almost as if they paint a naked portrait of the human condition. To read them incarnates the phrase penned by Michel de Montaigne. ‘If I were a maker of books,’ he wrote in the 16th century, ‘I would make a register, with comments, of various deaths. He who would teach men to die would teach them to live.’ Dawn breaks on your final morn. A prison guard hands you a blank sheet of paper and a pen two hours before your execution by Nazi firing squad. The customs and traditions of the time – sometimes, but not always, respected by the Nazi authorities – permit the condemned a final act of communication: the last letter. To whom do you write? What do you say, knowing this is the last chance to say it? It’s not just the heroic resistors whom the Nazis executed. One could be killed for far less. In the autumn of 1941, the Militärbefehlshaber in Frankreich – the military commander who controlled Paris – enacted the ‘hostage code’, whereby all those in a state of incarceration are considered to be political hostages. In the event of a ‘terrorist attack’ – an act of armed resistance against the occupier – these political hostages could be executed in reprisal. In other words, those arrested and imprisoned for, let’s say, writing or distributing illegal tracts and newspapers, protesting in the streets, or even listening to news from forbidden radio sources such as the BBC were, effectively, handed death sentences-in-waiting. I’ve read hundreds of last letters, written by armed resistors and political hostages alike. One day, I sat down to catalogue the ways in which the soon-to-be executed communicated to their loved ones the macabre news. It was an uncomfortable, but deeply moving, task. ‘I can give no longer any further testimony of my affection than this letter,’ began Robert Beck, the head of an active terrorist organisation, according to the Gestapo. ‘Colvert will never again see his Plouf, nor his little Plumette. He is leaving for a big big journey,’ he added, softening the blow for his children. Jacques Baudry, who had resisted the Nazis since his high-school days when he organised protests and marches, later participating in armed attacks against the occupiers, was rather blunter in his letter to his mother: ‘They are going to rip me from this life that you gave me and that I clung to so.’ Huynh Khuong An, a young high-school teacher arrested for possessing anti-fascist propaganda and related clandestine activities, was plucked from the cistern of political hostages one sunny October day. Writing to his lover, he implores: ‘Be courageous, ma chérie. It is no doubt the last time that I write you. Today, I will have lived.’ This turn of phrase, so simple grammatically speaking, is deceptively philosophical because it captures the interval that separates the writer from the reader, the one who will have lived from the one who lives on. Death was no longer on the horizon. The moment was decided, imminent and irrevocable. To read the letters is to take a journey inward, deep into the world of emotions at the very frontier of living and dying. In one’s final moments, superficiality cuts away, revealing something meaningful and deep about the human condition. From Montaigne: In everything else there may be sham: the fine reasonings of philosophy may be a mere pose in us; or else our trials, by not testing us to the quick, give us a chance to keep our face always composed. But in the last scene, between death and ourselves, there is no more pretending; we must talk plain French, we must show what there is that is good and clean at the bottom of the pot. The last letters communicate what this something, at the bottom of the pot, is. One of the most powerful theories to explain how humans face up to their own mortality was hypothesised by the American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in her groundbreaking book On Death and Dying (1969). When an individual learns of their impending death, they navigate among five stages of grieving, trying to come to terms with their own mortality: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Kübler-Ross observed terminally ill patients with a limited time horizon. For those killed by the Nazis, that interval was often condensed to the time allotted to write a letter. The last letters offer a raw portrait of grieving one’s own demise. Few of the condemned deny their fate. Some remain entrenched at the phase of depression. Others skip a phase, or oscillate between anger and acceptance, acceptance and depression. A surprising number traversed all the phases. And almost everyone bargains. Bargaining means asking the question: what would I do, if only I had more time? Montaigne would have us focus on the passages related to bargaining because these, by showing us what is at the bottom of the proverbial pot, teach us to live. If the last letters are any proof, the adage that your life passes before your eyes has some truth to it. It’s not the classic image of an entire lifetime; it’s more like watching old movie reels of favourite moments. ‘I do not feel the need to sleep,’ explains Arthur Loucheux – a well-known anti-militarist and leader of a miners’ strike – to his brother at 2 am of his final night, ‘not out of fear, but to remember my life, because to sleep, bah! won’t I have time [to do so] very soon?’ Tony Bloncourt, or ‘petit Toto’, who was part of a youth battalion and partook in armed resistance, recounts to his parents: ‘My entire past comes to me in a flash of images.’ A life of 21 years. Was he thinking, as he wrote, of the years he would not live to see? As I read their words, I’m hit by a flash from my own past. It’s a story I often tell my students who are planning to study abroad because it depicts a quintessential encounter between me, a culture and its language. It’s a story about the little details that convey so much about local history, hiding in plain sight. There is a last-letter link, too, though at the time I did not know it. I was on my way to a lunch, navigating still-unfamiliar streets to my destination, at the crossroads of rue de Vouillé and rue Georges-Pitard in the quaint 15th arrondissement of Paris. The names meant nothing to me back then. I was oblivious to the stories that marked the public spaces I transited and inhabited. I had just arrived in France and was still learning the language. To help me practise my grammar skills, someone had the bright idea to impose a very peculiar rule: every spoken sentence had to employ the subjunctive in some way or another. Any basic French grammar book will tell you the subjunctive is used to indicate some sort of subjectivity, or uncertainty, in the mind of the speaker. Feelings of doubt and desire, as well as expressions of necessity, possibility and judgment. The subjunctive inhabits many last letters. Georges Pitard’s letter to his wife, Lienne, begins with the subjunctive, used as an expression of necessity: ‘It is necessary for you to be extremely courageous, because this time misfortune is upon us; it flashed like lightning and it strikes us.’ Pitard, I would eventually learn, was a lawyer who defended those unjustly imprisoned at the beginning of the occupation and was arrested for it. A man of principle: ‘I only did good, thought of easing misery,’ he wrote in his last letter to his wife before being executed as a political hostage. ‘But for some time now the elements are raging and everything conspires against men like me.’ Knowing these details adds a layer of meaning to my memory and its resonance, with the last scene playing out again and again each time I tell the story. Pitard’s final words always the same. We can imagine a 40-something Pitard in his cell writing these words as time inexorably ticks and tocks. He seems to regret that ‘we quarrelled a few times, hurt each other for trifles’. As the execution looms ever closer, he bargains with time. Remembering the past, perhaps in shock that tomorrow will not be just like yesterday, he writes: ‘This evening, I think of your sweetness, your kindness, of our sweet moments, those from long ago and those of yesterday, know well, my darling, one could not love you more than I did.’ He seeks one final escape from the fate that awaits him, in a place where everything is pure love, where nothing else exists except dreams of her: ‘And I will fall asleep with your sweet image in my eyes and the taste of our last kisses that are not that distant, my sweet friend, my gentle little Lienne. Be sensible … Be reasonable. Love me, for a long time yet.’ The subjunctive again. Expressions of desire and longing. When time seems like an infinite plain before us, we take the days ahead for granted. There will always be time to do the things that matter most. Too often, maybe, these are a small part of a bigger canvas often dominated by other priorities. Time duly runs its course, and the letter comes to an end, but not before ‘Geo’ adds a postscript: ‘I kiss passionately your photograph and press it to my heart, the first [photo] of our youth, and the one from Luchon in which you are wearing flowers.’ I imagine him in the dark of night, pressing his lips to the photo. Reliving the memories. When Lienne reads his letter, Georges will have lived. Despite the raw emotion of the last letters, it’s hard to imagine that the elements, raging, will conspire against me. Psychologically, as humans, we flee from the idea of the world carrying on without us. We push the fact of dying deep into our subconscious. Instead, we take comfort in the naive belief that tomorrow will be like yesterday, and so on, and so forth. Such is the power of denial. I remember the exact moment when the façade of denial began to crumble. To plunge deeper into the ambiance of the dark years of the Nazi occupation, I searched out other writings from the time. I found a copy of La patrie se fait tous les jours, an anthology of texts from the French intellectual resistance. It was a first edition. The pages were crisp, still uncut, as if the book had just come off the printing press. Except it had been published in 1947, less than three years after France was liberated. To leaf through the pages required, first, slicing them apart. The same movement one makes to open a letter, it turns out. It was a slow and meticulous process. I dutifully opened them, lingering to read a poem by the resistance poet Paul Éluard – ‘Liberté’ (1942) – until I arrived at page 111. There, as I carefully opened the next few pages to reveal the last letter of Daniel Decourdemanche (known by the pseudonym of Jacques Decour) – a French professor of German literature in his 30s, living in Paris – something happened. Psychologically, it was like the floor fell out from under me, plummeting me into the tumult of the times. Decourdemanche was part of the intellectual resistance. His crime, which led to his May date with a Nazi firing squad, was to organise and distribute underground magazines, whose purpose was to rally intellectuals to the anti-fascist cause, and to inject some humanism into news cycles gorged with nationalist and divisive propaganda. In his last letter, tempted to imagine what might have been had he had more time, Decourdemanche writes to his parents: ‘I dreamt a great deal, this last while, about the wonderful meals we would have when I was freed.’ But he accepts these experiences will not include him: ‘You will have them without me, with family, but not in sadness.’ Instead of regret, his mind drifts to the meaningful experiences he did live: ‘I relived … all my travels, all my experiences, all my meals.’ And at the end: ‘It is 8 am, it will be time to leave. I ate, smoked, drank some coffee. I do not see any more business to settle.’ I sat there, moved but immobile, staring at these last lines, then at his signature. ‘Votre Daniel’, your Daniel. I had the strange impression of looking in a mirror, of staring death in the face. Another Daniel, also a humanist in a world of inhumanity and ruthless self-serving politics. Reading his words, I drift across the thin frontier separating the past from a parallel world. In reading how he and others confronted death, in bearing witness to their fears, hopes, joys and regrets, I am instinctively transported to an analogous moment. To whom would I write? What would I say? Am I ready to die? What would I bargain for? That’s what the last letters do, they open this frontier and beckon us to cross. Montaigne counsels his readers to come to terms with death by learning to no longer fear it. This has a liberating effect, according to the old sage, because it allows us to be more in tune with ourself while we are among the living. The trick is to cultivate what is at the bottom of the pot long before the final act. Reading the last letters allows us to play such a trick on time. For we, the readers, are still in the world of the living. We are not yet part of those who, when the ink dries on the page and it is read by loved ones later, will have lived. Maybe we do not know what, when the time comes, we might bargain for. But the last letters tell us what those on the other side of life wanted, what they bargained for, at death’s door. The verdict had fallen. Forty-one-year-old André Cholet, condemned to death for running the radio counter-espionage wing of a major resistance group, had just seen his wife for the last time. He recounts the scene in his last letter: I still have the time to talk to you ma petite, as if you were still here close to me, on the other side of the wire mesh. For this last day you were beautiful like you had never been before and oh what grief is now yours. I would like to be in this moment still. Bargaining to be there in that instant. To see her eyes, her smile. To smile back. To soak up all the non-verbal gestures that define a person, a loved one, her. To blow a kiss. How seldom do we remark these moments in normal times? They seem unremarkable when lived day to day, but in the last scene, between death and oneself, the emotions, hopes and regrets that comprise the human condition are heightened a thousandfold. What if we were attuned in such a way that daily encounters with loved ones were heightened a thousandfold? Or even just tenfold? Bargaining is the bedfellow of regret. Twenty-one-year-old Roger Pironneau was not sorry for the espionage that led to his arrest. He does not regret resisting. But, writing to his parents, he is sorry ‘for the suffering I caused you, the suffering I am causing you, and that which I will cause you. Sorry to everyone for the evil that I did …’ And he is sorry ‘for all the good that I did not do’. I imagine his mind wandering – let’s be clear, even though there is no chance, no illusion, of actually having more time, it wanders toward a question we readers can still pose: if only I had had more time, what good could I have done? Last letters are finite. They contain the words that fit the page allotted, and no more. What is not written remains unsaid. Arrested for acts of sabotage and other clandestine activities, Maurice Lasserre composes his last letter to his wife, Margot. He signs his name one last time, with the unique characteristic furls that make his signature his. There is just enough space for a final PS: ‘I close the envelope by cherishing you and kissing you for the last time, again good kisses. I send you my wedding ring and a lock of hair that you will keep in memory of me …’ As he folds the letter to place it in an envelope, something unexpected happens. ‘They are giving me more paper,’ he notes below his signature, before continuing on a fresh page. ‘I take advantage to write to you again and to kiss you still once more …’ One more gesture of love. ‘And the little ones, and the older ones, too.’ Lasserre writes on. A message for each of his children. And one more thought destined for Margot: ‘Still more kisses and think that I am yours, even in face of the death that is coming.’ Another sheet of paper is like a new day, though if we thought it might be the last, perhaps our perception of the most ordinary of gestures would change. Bargaining exposes the raw core of what gives meaning to the everyday gestures. When we are young, we think there will be an infinite number of blank pages upon which to write our story. Twenty-something Claude Lalet found himself, the morning of his last day in the world of the living, writing to his new bride. Sure, he was active in various protests, which led to his arrest. But it was never supposed to end like this, being executed as a political hostage in reprisal for the assassination of a German officer by the armed resistance. In the back of a truck on the way to the quarry where he is to be executed, he composes himself: ‘Already the last letter, and already I have to leave you!’ The repetition of the word ‘already’ betrays his anger; it’s simply not fair, his fate. But Lalet does not want to dwell in anger. Focusing on the beauty around him, he observes in poignant prose: ‘Oh the road is beautiful, ah, truly!’ As the truck rumbles forward and reality sinks in deeper, he battles to keep his bitterness at bay. What was it that made life so wonderful? ‘I know I must clench my teeth. Life was so beautiful; but let us hold on to, yes hold on to our laughs and our songs …’ Lalet has every reason to be bitter, but the final lines of his last letter suggest that, deep down, he realises that anger, however valid, is empty sustenance: ‘Courage, joy; immense joy … I love you always, constantly. I kiss you, I hug you with all my strength. Long live life! Long live joy and love.’ All those whose letters are cited above died at the hands of the authoritarian state. They came from all walks of life and diverse political backgrounds. Some took up arms to fight back, while others resisted non-violently, or were simply caught up in the repressive nets of the state. I reread their last letters in parallel to the newsfeeds that, every day, bring ubiquitous headlines stirring nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments. Even if I cannot quite wrap my head around the absurdity of being in a position of writing my last letter, there is foreboding in the air. Instinctively, I look for parallels in the past, drifting back across that frontier the last letters have opened to me. Daniel Decourdemanche wrote in his diary in 1938 on the eve of the infamous Munich Agreement: One prepares oneself, one ponders about what is to come, about what must kill us without our being able to have a gesture of defence, but it will maybe take a long time, like all incurable maladies. Waiting so long for the inevitable, this is the test. The diary entry is a prescient bookend to his last letter penned in 1942, before he was executed in the glade at the sinister Mont-Valérien fortress on the outskirts of Paris. As he watched the forces of history unfold, Decourdemanche was no doubt thinking of the possibility of his own death – a life cut short by the tumult of the times. ‘How to find your way around?’ he asks, in a world in which humanism is a bad word, where vitriol is the coin of the realm. Where the dykes of civility and tolerance that once kept fanaticism at bay have burst. Where there is power in hating the other, in calling the other names, in blaming the other for all our problems. As if doing so acts as a shield against whatever may come. ‘The strong who face this test,’ he proffers, ‘are not those we expect.’ Falling in step, toeing the line of intolerance, embracing the newly emboldened toxic masculinity? No. ‘The strong,’ Decourdemanche surmises, ‘are those who loved love more than everything else.’ ‘It is the right time for us to remember love,’ he tells himself. ‘Have we loved enough,’ he asks? ‘Have we spent several hours a day marvelling at others, being happy together, feeling the price of contact, the weight and value of hands, eyes, the body? Do we still know how to devote ourselves to tenderness?’ These are formidable questions. Once you realise that your days are numbered, that other emotions are competing for time and space in your life, answering them offers a chance to reorient yourself amid all the noise and contempt: ‘It is time, before disappearing in the trembling of an Earth without hope, to be entirely and definitely love, tenderness, friendship, because there is nothing else. One must swear to only care about loving, to love, to open your soul and hands, to look with the best of your eyes, to hold what you love close to you, to march without anguish, radiating tenderness.’ Back in the 21st century, this Daniel wonders how many people around him are having the same existential thoughts. Would it make a difference if everyone confronted their own mortality in earnest? Thinking of the bottom of the proverbial Montaignian pot amid the constant brouhaha, the rhetoric, the posturing and pretence of a world clutching at madness, I ask myself the question that those who can still bargain for time should ask: how might I live my life differently? Source of the article