Nothing makes a new home more thoroughly one’s own than being sick in that new home. I don’t mean that the place must be marked by the unfortunate byproducts of illness. It’s more that the body requires illness to allow itself to sink fully into a new place of lodging. Having had my first illness in my first home, I was reminded of Virginia Woolf’s marvelous essay On Being Ill which was published a few years ago in a very slim and elegant volume by Paris Press. Paris Press publishes important work by women, keeping in print the writings of Muriel Ruykeyser and bringing into print the poetry of National Book Critics Circle Award recipient Ruth Stone.
Woolf’s On Being Ill is simultaneously a love song to illness and a lively protestation against the language defying powers of illness. “Consider how common illness is,” Woolf writes, “how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view.” My point exactly. But Woolf wants to know why, with illness of some variety looming large periodically in every life, no great literature has been written on the subject. “Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache.” The reason? Illness is too destructive to language. We reach for words about love and come up with them more easily than words about our suffering bodies. Woolf’s point, too, is that for all the ways we keep track of our thoughts, giving the mind an ample life on the page, the life of the body goes mostly untold. And the varieties of sympathy that might also become the subject of something literary? Those too are off limits for the simple reason that our compassion for others is too often a delusion that we too feel as they do. Inadvertently, we render the pain of others a spectacle of enjoyable sympathy, which is more than a little grim.
Perhaps Woolf is right about the failure to represent illness in as much as disease, though shockingly common in literary works of all varieties, often stands in for something else entirely. This morning I taught William Dunbar’s “Lament for the Makers”, which contemplates fading health and sickness as an index of inevitable mortality. What would religious poetry be without the sensory array of diseased bodies, which, it seems, was all that truly excited John Donne by the end of his life. But Woolf offers little comfort and no religious escape hatch.
There is, in illness, insight but of what quality. Woolf remarks, “it is only the recumbent who know what, after all, nature is at no pains to conceal–that she in the end will conquer; heat will leave the world; stiff with frost we shall cease to drag ourselves about the fields; ice will lie thick upon the factory and engine; the sun will go out.” This ends up being the best and worst illness gives us: a penchant for the easily apocalyptic. For all that Woolf is right, it takes a certain temperament to range from a temperature of 102 to the snuffing out of the sun. One wonders, too, how often Woolf sharpened her scythe and went out working in the fields.
Perhaps we might say that illness resists the grandness of literature because it is often trapped in the province of melodrama. And, moreover, that the proportion of melodrama is in an inverse relationship to the severity of the illness. How pleasingly the most minor of sickness can consume us. This, and not the pain of illness, per se, is what is most isolating, but the isolation is a willful seeking of respite in injury that insulates us from the demands of others, allowing us to care for ourselves–with rest, fluids, and fine writing–as we may fail to do in our everyday lives. Like Virginia Woolf, prone to illness and its temptations, we vacation in the shelter of minor torment.