La nuit, l’esprit s’exalte.
Benoît Niogret (1962)At night, the mind gets overexcited.
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A line from a book I probably read in 1972 or 73 that has stuck with me and still reminds me always to get enough sleep. The name of the book was Et tu ne scupuleras pas, by a certain Benoît Niogret, a priest-therapist practitioner of la méthode Vittoz; Niogret wrote the book to help people struggling with religious scrupulosity.
The méthode Vittoz (it can be referred to simply as la Vittoz) was devised by Swiss physician Roger Vittoz (†1925) and has some concepts and practices that herald the later widely practiced cognitive therapy (known to French-speakers as la cognitive) and some that parallel general meditative techniques—but also some that might put one in mind of 19th-century phrenology. T.S. Eliot was one notable person who spent time under Roger Vittoz’s care in Lausanne in 1922; traces of his time there turn up in The Waste Land. There is an American Vittoz Society (https://www.americanvittozsociety.com); I have not come across signs online of the existence of a French or Swiss one. But surely there must be such!
Linguistically, note: 1. The almost adverbial function of la in la nuit, which has the force of “in the” or “at.” 2. The first and most important meaning of esprit, which is “mind.” The second is “spirit.” The third is “wit,” i.e., wittiness. 3. This use of s’exalter, which in the context of mental health has a negative value.
I appreciate the compactness and the rhythm of this sentence.