What’s striking, though, is that the idea of sleeping on the subway seemed then, as it did in Clark’s song, larksome and big-hearted—something that you chose to do. A scant decade or so later you slept on the subway either because you lived or suffered or sustained your addiction on the subway. In the “The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three,” the original movie, from 1974, with David Shire’s matchless twelve-tonescore , shortly after the terrorists take over a dilapidated 6 train, a woman (looking uncannily like Maureen Stapleton) is shown snoring away: her sleeping on the subway is more self-protective than celebratory. I’m just dropping out of this scene. That remained the subway tone for years.THE change since has been dramatized only occasionally: there was a nice scene in the recent Broadway musical “If/Then” in which a car of stalled subway passengers sing the phrase “There’s a Signal.” It makes sense. New Yorkers of this generation, though unafraid, know the catechism of the stalled subway by heart: “There is a signal malfunction.” “We are being held momentarily by the train’s dispatcher. Thank you for your patience.” “We apologize for the delay.” What the youngsters don’t know is that this minimal courtesy is, by older standards, astounding chivalry. (Way back when, you sat in the stalled subway as one of the damned waiting for Cerberus to whip his tail around and allow you to escape from Hell. No one down there apologized for anything.) All the new activity on the trains seems at first to run against the notion that the subways have become a place for sleeping. What we need to sleep, after all, is quiet and a seat and maybe a mask and an early start, as Arianna Huffington, currently campaigning for more sleep for more Americans, will happily point out. Huffington’s war for sleep must be the strangest of modern public-service campaigns: she doesn’t seem to grasp that people are not sleeping less because they think, wrongly, that not sleeping is good for your career—that is true only for a tiny group of competitive insomniacs. Most people are not sleeping because they do not have time to sleep. They have small children or jobs that start early—or, not at all infrequently, both. They are high-school kids expected, against all reason, to get to school at 8 a.m. and then take home four hours of homework at night, as part of an arms race with other kids doing the same things. They have one job or two—or else they race from gig to gig and chore to chore as rapidly as they can. Which leads us to the point: people are not sleeping on the subway now because it is fun. They are not most often these days sleeping on the subway because they are stoned or homeless. They are sleeping on the subway because they are sleepy. Exhaustion is the signature emotion of our time. Huffington is not wrong about that—though she imagines that if we all work harder at sleeping we would sleep better, when the truth is that, for most people, working harder is what wore them out. Overworked, overstressed, today’s sleeping rider is a symbol and a symptom of today’s subway: the bullet train of the wrung-out classes, the perpetual-motion machine that services today’s errand-driven economy. The Daily News, in reporting the Bratton wake-up initiative, even quoted a grandmother named Antoinette Perry—yeah, just like the founder of the Tonys; it seems a bit suspicious —who said, “Everybody falls asleep on the trains, especially after a hard day’s work,” and added that the rocking of the trains is comforting, like a mother’s womb.