In enumerating the forces friendly to man, no scientific book that we can recall has mentioned the pillow. Yet in the experience of all, it is one of the most constant and helpful of friends. How many tender hopes and quaint fancies are broached to it; how many passionate or yearning prayers does it hear, too sacred for human ears; how many joyful smiles are molded in the sympathetic surface, and how many tears it can absorb. The conspicuous trait in the personality of the pillow is receptivity. Pudgy and rotund in physique, it is like pudgy and rotund people, eminently endowed with the power to absorb confidences, and digest them without inconvenience.
Hence, its responsiveness to mood, its wondrous adaptability. Come to your pillow in a passion, it will reflect your hot breath and feel satisfactorily you’re clenching fists. Come to it in serenity, its linen will be cool and clean its texture ineffably restful. Come to it in grief; it will encircle and protect you with its warm, solacing folds.
As a confidant, the pillow is strong exactly where human beings are weak. It does not exhaust you with an ill-adjusted mood, or drive you mad with well-meaning irrelevant philosophy. It offers no solution for your problems; it makes no pretense to understanding your heart. It is entirely inert, impassive, and uncommunicative. Moreover, it is wonderfully patient. You pour upon it a torrent of abuse; you plead with it and narrate to it; you dig your elbows into it; in the middle of your violence, you suddenly caress it; or laugh to it; or attempt to stuff it in your mouth, and all the while it makes no retort. It accuses you of no inconsistency; it does not look hurt or injured. How many people do you think would endure such a handling? Let us appreciate the gentle pillow.
The discretion of the pillow equals its gentleness. One need never be afraid to tell a pillow anything. Its reticence is complete. With a human confidant, you constantly distress yourself with scruples; you suppress this detail, or generalize that problem. With a pillow, plump comes the whole story, and the air is cleared.
A pillow is never impatient and it never interrupts. It is an oddly stimulating thought to consider how many great novels and other works of literary or musical art have had for their first audience – pillows. If you outline to your pillow the plot of your new story, it does not point out flaws or nail incongruities. It is patient; it waits for you to see them yourself. If you softly whistle to it the theme of an embryonic sonata, it does not hint plagiarism, or any other way conveys disapproval. On the contrary, it listens so patiently and respectfully, that you must be an unappreciative performer indeed if you are not move to fresh creation. One cannot to highly praise the perfect justice and candor of the pillow. There is nothing about it pretense – unless possibly the sham; and that, thank Heaven, is obsolescent. You always remove the sham, too, before getting at close quarters with the pillow; whereas, in the case of most people, the sham, whatever there is of it, is fixed.
We must not lay so much stress on the passive and receptive qualities of the pillow as to forget its more positive traits. Of these, the most valuable is what we may call its composure, or serenity. It is never ruffled (we are speaking metaphorically), but always pleads deliberation. When, after a long and baffling day spent fighting with intangible enemies or getting rubbed the wrong way by the thousand insignificant frictions that insult philosophy, you at length lay your weary head upon your pillow, what large and detached views that do it not gradually suggest. It calms your boiling brain with a purely animal quiet; it answers your fretful bewilderments with an impersonal imperturbability. Without speech or sign, it answerably asserts the wisdom of patience, of postponement. It reminds you the medicinal quality of time, of the drowsy syrups of the world. Like a hand on the brow, it tranquilizes you, not mentally, but elementally. What man has not held with his pillow some such conversation like this:-
Man: I am at the end of my rope. I can stand this no longer;
What am I to do?
Pillow: How soft I am.
Man: Yes, you are deliciously soft – but what has that to do with my problems? I think I’ll get up and dress, and go – but I might wait till tomorrow.
Pillow: Wait a while. Don’t your legs feel heavy?
Man: Luxuriously heavy, and my eyelids, too. Let’s see, what was I thinking about? – What a jolly old boy you are!
Pillow: Jolly old boy you are. Jolly old boy you are. (Aside) He’s leaning harder now; he’ll be asleep in no time.
Thus, practically does the pillow pursue its friendly services? Of course it would be grotesque to claim too much for its devotion. Doubtless there are times when even its white surface looks uninviting, when its impersonality repels rather than attracts us, and when we prefer an ill-adjusted, indiscreet, impatient, interrupting and irrational human being. But that only proves that nothing in this world can be everything. The pillow is not a microcosm, but it is a pillow, - let us not undervalue or fail to be duly thankful for its ministrations.
From: A Note on the Essay
By Jose Ma. Hernandez
Mimeographed Prepublication
Copy, 1949.
