Daybreak

Waking up means joining the world anew, day after day. Sometimes, those early moments are magical and quiet, almost dream-like. But often, we wake up with a start, stressed and harried. Dreading the day’s tasks. Influencers like to recommend all kinds of morning rituals for self-optimisation. And in this book, Christoph Ribbat shows that this is no new phenomenon. Going back to medieval cloisters, we can find obsessive observations of how people wake up, in an effort to make the process more efficient.

Daybreak sheds light on the relationship between intimacy and society: the things we do in bed, in the bathroom, and in the kitchen, when we are not quite awake but have already started our day. Christoph Ribbat offers a striking exploration of morning people and those who have to drag themselves out of bed every day. He portrays an English queen who didn’t enjoy her breakfast beer and the rousing techniques of the staff in the sleeper cars of the American railways. We encounter a Parisian artist who paints an overly eager toddler in the early hours of the morning. And we watch as one of the Beatles wakes up and heads straight to the piano, with a global hit in his head. The early worm, according to the message of this book, has extra time for creativity. But they could also do with a few more minutes of sleep.