I can’t sleep. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the lingering spell of seasickness from the Channel crossing. Maybe it is the hotel. I am staying where Ben stayed. The Star Hotel (Star Inn during Ben’s time) in Southampton is either charmingly old or decrepitly old, depending on your perspective. Opinions are divided, as a quick scan of Tripadvisor reveals. “Loved the location and the historical style of the hotel,” cooed one reviewer. “They say that Benjamin Franklin stayed here in 1785,” noted another, dryly. “I hope he got a better night’s sleep than we did!”
We like the idea of old places but not the reality. We need our twenty-first-century comforts and doodads. A few inns claim to provide both, boasting of their “storied history and modern conveniences” or some such nonsense, but the truth is old places demand a trade-off, a sacrifice. Heritage comes at a cost, a history tax exacted in the form of sleepless nights and comforts denied.
At the Star Hotel, the history tax is steep. In the lobby, peeling paint and faded paisley wallpaper clash with highlighter-yellow pandemic-era tape warning, “Keep a Safe Distance!” It looks less like a hotel lobby and more like a crime scene. My room is a vast hodgepodge of eras. Ornate chandeliers and oversized antique mirrors compete with harsh fluorescent lights and particleboard dressers.
I toss and turn on the too-soft mattress, clutching the too-hard pillow. I can’t pin all the blame for my restlessness on the Star Hotel. Sleep and I have always had a volatile relationship. It’s never there when I need it but always there when I don’t. I regularly slip into a midday torpor but am wide awake at midnight.
I turn to Ben for help. Late in life, he penned a little ditty called “The Art of Procuring Pleasant Dreams.” Dreams are important, Ben tells me. “If while we sleep, we can have pleasing dreams, it is, as the French say, tant gagné, so much added to the pleasures of life.” I agree, Ben. I could really use some tant gagné. But how?
Start with the body, fleshly Ben advises, “for when the body is uneasy, the mind will be disturbed by it; and disagreeable ideas of various kinds, will in sleep be the natural consequences.” His detailed advice that follows sounds remarkably modern: get lots of exercise but only before eating, never after. Don’t eat heavy meals before bedtime. Ensure there is plenty of air flow in your bedroom. Wear thin and porous pajamas. I have done all this but still can’t sleep. What to do, Ben?
“Beat up and turn your pillow, shake the bedclothes well with at least 20 shakes, then throw the bed open and leave it to cool.”
Check. Still wide awake. What now?
“Continuing undress’d, walk about your chamber till your skin has had time to discharge its load.… When you begin to feel the cool air unpleasant, then return to your bed; you will soon fall asleep, and your sleep will be sweet and pleasant.”
I do as you say, Ben, but experience no sleep, sweet or otherwise. What is wrong with me?
I turn to the last sentence of Ben’s prescription. All becomes clear. “What is necessary above all things, a good conscience.” That must be it. My conscience is defective. To be clear, I have not murdered anyone or stolen classified documents or placed nonrecyclables in the recycle bin. My crimes are imagined. I am a not-good-enough son, an impatient father, and a feckless friend. Not true, mostly, but that doesn’t matter. Imagined crimes generate real guilt. Ben slept well and, by all accounts, procured many pleasant dreams. Can we assume he had a good conscience?
Not necessarily. During his brief stopover in Southampton en route to Philadelphia, Ben met many people—old friends mainly, but also his estranged son William. They had not seen each other for nearly a decade and had corresponded only once, in 1784. William initiated the conversation, and I admire him for it. It took courage. “Dear and Honoured Father,” he begins. “Ever since the termination of the unhappy contest between Great Britain and America, I have been anxious to write to you, and to endeavor to revive that affectionate intercourse and connection which till the commencement of the late troubles had been the pride and happiness of my life.”
William then explains why he had remained faithful to King George. “I can with confidence appeal not only to you but to my God, that I have uniformly acted from a strong sense of what I conceived my duty to my King, and regard to my country, required,” he said, adding plaintively, “If I have been mistaken, I cannot help it.”
What William does not mention is the active form his loyalty to the Crown took. Once released from a Connecticut prison in 1778, William traveled to New York where he ran a spy network on behalf of the British and was, by some accounts, the city’s leading Loyalist figure. In 1782, with the war all but over, he sailed for London, never to step foot on American soil again.
William explains but doesn’t apologize. Given similar circumstances, he would act the same again. But he clearly hoped to reconcile with his father. He heard he’d be stopping in England on his way home to Philadelphia. Could they meet?
It took Ben Franklin several weeks to reply. When he did, he composed what is, I think, the most heartbreaking of the thousands of letters he wrote. It begins optimistically enough. “Dear Son, [I] am glad to find that you desire to revive the affectionate intercourse that formerly existed between us,” he writes. “It will be very agreeable to me.” Then he turns bitter. “Nothing has ever hurt me so much and affected me with such keen sensations, as to find myself deserted in my old age by my only son; and not only deserted, but to find him taking up arms against me, in a cause wherein my good fame, fortune and life were all at stake.”
Ouch. Ben may have been gentle and amiable, a conciliator, but he could also play the guilt card as effectively and ruthlessly as any Jewish mother. Okay, Ben concedes, William felt he had a duty to his king. “We are men, all subject to errors. Our opinions are not in our power; they are form’d and govern’d much by circumstances that are often as inexplicable as they are irresistible.” But, he continues, twisting the knife, “there are natural duties which precede political ones, and cannot be extinguish’d by them.” In other words, William’s duty to his father trumped his duty to his king. Having made his point, Ben withdraws the knife and retreats from the emotional combat. “This is a disagreeable subject,” he says. “I drop it.” Ben did agree to meet William in Southampton. The lines of communication were frayed but still open.
Ben’s few days in Southampton were busy. There was the prelaunch frenzy that precedes any journey, then and now, and the matter of Ben’s luggage, which had gone missing somewhere in France. He met several old friends, such as the Shipleys of Twyford House, reminiscing about happier times, before the war.
Amid all this activity, Ben managed to find time to visit Martin’s Salt Hot Water Baths. Spas like this were gaining in popularity, as the rest of the world caught up with Ben’s almost evangelical belief in the therapeutic benefits of water. Floating on his back, the noon sun high in the sky, Ben fell fast asleep for nearly an hour, motionless and at peace. It was, he records in his journal, “a thing I never did before, and should hardly have thought possible. Water is the easiest bed that can be.”
Floating intrigues me. It strikes me as swimming but without the effort, or the fear. Yes, I must float, like Ben. I try tracking down Martin’s Salt Hot Water Baths, but it has sunk without a trace. I feel silly. What was I expecting? It has been more than two centuries. I regroup and double my efforts. My research—okay, Googling—turns up an establishment called Limitless Float. I like the name and the infinite ease it suggests. I click to learn more.
“Do you know how to unplug from the world and just BE?”
Obviously not. Why else would I be reading this?
“Our body can heal itself but without the proper environment to do so we continue to reach breaking point.”
I hear you. I am familiar with said breaking point and, as a place person, have spent a lifetime searching for that “proper environment.” Can we get to the floating bit please?
“Floating provides an opportunity for our mind to rest, re-connect, and recover.”
Apparently floating also enhances alliteration. Stop, Eric. That is cynical. Not very possibilian. Not very Ben. Trust your experience, he would advise. I make an appointment at Limitless Float.
It’s a pleasant summer evening, so I decide to walk. Limitless Float is not easy to find. I turn this way and that, blindly following Google Maps into cul-de-sacs and dead ends. Finally, I find it, hiding in an industrial park, sandwiched between an auto parts store and a dance school.
I step inside and am greeted by Daniel. He is young and clear-complexioned and disturbingly serene—in other words, just the sort of person you’d expect to work at a place called Limitless Float. Normally, I hate people with perfect pores and serene countenances, but I like Daniel. He has the skin but not the subtly smug attitude that so often accompanies it.
Daniel guides me into a room, illuminated with blue lighting and with a Star Trek feel, as if Captain Kirk were dipping into a spa on Omicron Delta. On one side of the room is a shower stall and on the other a white, egg-shaped pod topped with a large, hinged lid that looks as if it dislodged from the USS Enterprise.
Daniel tells me what to expect. Perhaps it’s protocol, or perhaps he senses my trepidation, but he spends a lot of time reassuring me about the risk of claustrophobia. The lid on the pod does not lock, will not lock, cannot lock, he tells me with the same tone one might use with a terrified toddler. I am relieved, but still wary.
Daniel leaves. He’ll be right outside, he reassures me. I shower, then insert the earplugs he recommended, and enter the water the way I always do, tentatively, unsure whether it is friend or foe. The water is warm, set to a constant 97.7 degrees Fahrenheit, Daniel had informed me. So that’s why the pod feels so familiar. It reminds me of a place where I spent nine blissful months, at the same temperature, floating effortlessly, oblivious to the harsh world that awaited me.
I hear Ben in my head: “You will be no swimmer till you can place some confidence in the power of the water to support you.” That is the problem. I’ve never acquired that confidence.
Until now. The highly salinized water in the pod is so buoyant I don’t need to stroke or flail or do anything at all to stay afloat. Nature does all the work. Floating effortlessly, eyes closed, earplugs inserted, I realize how different this is from my usual state. I fret and strain constantly, as if my worrying somehow propelled the clouds across the sky, made the rain fall, the Earth spin. Now I realize how silly this is. Nature doesn’t need my puny exertions. It can support itself just fine—and me too.
What I experience in my pod is a taste of the Enlightenment. Like today’s scientists, those of the eighteenth century studied nature in the hope it might reveal its secrets. Those insights enabled us to tame nature and thus improve our lives. Unlike most scientists today, those of the Enlightenment retained a religious, or at least spiritual, motivation. By studying nature, they hoped God would reveal his secrets too—not only about the physical world but the moral universe as well. Witness the phrase that appears early in the Declaration of Independence about the “laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.” This is the deism that Franklin subscribed to off and on. God reveals his majesty through his works—that is, nature—and has endowed humans with the power of reason so they can uncover these natural laws. Nature, and by extension God, can be known, and what can be known can be trusted.
I decide to take this exercise in trust a step further. I practice dying. That sounds a bit unhinged, I know, but stay with me. Floating in my pod, eyes closed, I inhale deeply and with each exhalation try to expand that trust. I rehearse letting go of… everything. I let go of expectations and of striving. I let go of all distinctions, between success and failure, wealth and poverty, health and illness—even the distinction between life and death. Dying, I realize, is nothing more or less than the ultimate test of trust. Do you trust in—call it what you like, God, the universe, nature, science—or do you not? It is that simple, though not at all easy.
I had, until now, kept the lid of my pod ajar, just in case Daniel was less than truthful about it not locking shut. Now, high on trust, I decide to close the lid and see if I can tolerate the darkness. I immediately experience a jolt of fear, a primal panic, and push the lid open just a bit. I must have pushed too hard, though, because it pops open, and I have to stand to close it. That’s when I realize I have been floating not in an unfathomable body of water but in a space-age bathtub perhaps two feet deep. I feel foolish. Maybe all fear is like that. To use a different analogy, we spend a lifetime afraid of falling from a great height, only to discover late in life the drop was only a foot or two. We spend decades cowering in fear of an illusion, a nothing.
I am pondering all this, when New Age music begins to play, indicating my float is, alas, not limitless. My sixty minutes are up. I towel dry and emerge to find Daniel, offering me green tea. Of course.
“How was it?” he asks.
“Religious,” I say, without hesitation.
Why did I choose that word? I’m not sure. I meant it not in the traditional sense but the Franklinian one. What was the term he used for God? Powerful Goodness. I like that. Powerful Goodness is what heals a wound, lights a dark sky. Powerful Goodness is what keeps you afloat, and without even trying.
Benjamin and William Franklin met several times at the Star Hotel. These must have been tense, heart-wrenching encounters, but the sad truth is we don’t know what transpired. In his journal, Ben records only the most perfunctory of observations. “Met my son, who had arrived from London the evening before.” William is equally reticent.
We do know the two Franklins conducted business. With his father looking over his shoulder, William transferred the deeds of his property in New Jersey and New York to his own son (Ben’s grandson), Temple. William was told never to contact his son again.
Clearly, there was no reconciliation between Ben and William. Why not? They were once as close as any father and son. The war was over. William was willing to put the acrimony behind him and move on. His father was not.
This is not Likable Ben. This is not Admirable Ben. This is Despicable Ben. Why couldn’t you forgive your son, Ben? Clearly, he still loved you, and you still loved him. Yes, he chose the wrong side during the war, but you are far from blameless. Recall how you hurt your own father by absconding at age seventeen. What about your “natural duties”? Why demand William be a better son than you were? Besides, Ben, you clearly have a great capacity for forgiveness. You forgave William Keith, the governor who sent you on a fool’s errand to London. You forgave many of your British friends who sided with the Crown during the war. Why not forgive your own flesh and blood? I can’t imagine my daughter doing anything, anything, that would cause me to disown her.
The German woman’s question resurfaces in my mind: “How is he a role model if he broke with his son?” I still don’t have a tidy answer. I can’t dismiss Ben’s refusal to forgive William as a minor personality flaw, as if an otherwise perfect Ben cracked his knuckles or whistled annoyingly. He disowned his one surviving son. I notice Ben doesn’t list his estrangement with William among his errata, those correctable mistakes of life. Some mistakes cannot be corrected, no matter how many future editions are published. I get that. What disappoints me is that when it came to his son, Ben didn’t even try.
On July 27, 1785, Ben received word that his ship, the London Packet, would soon sail for Philadelphia. Passengers included Ben and his two grandchildren, Benny and Temple; a French sculptor named Jean-Antoine Houdon, en route to Mount Vernon to render a likeness of George Washington; and two angora cats, presents from Madame Helvetius. Not on board was Ben’s luggage. It had been located in France but was detained at a customs house in Le Havre. (Franklin wouldn’t be reunited with his luggage for several months.)
That evening, Ben and friends enjoyed one last meal together at the Star Inn, then continued the festivities aboard the London Packet, anchored just offshore. Franklin’s journal entry for the following day consists of a single sentence: “When I waked in the morning found the company gone, and the ship under sail.” That’s it. No mention of his state of mind or what he left behind: a country he once called home and a son who, despite everything, still loved him.
Benjamin Franklin, his long and useful life nearing its final act, would never see either again.