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- Herausgeber: Renard Press
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
'Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza, epic poems to typhoid, odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no – with a few exceptions – literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent.' Penned in 1925 during the aftermath of a nervous breakdown, On Being Ill is a groundbreaking essay by the Modernist giant Virginia Woolf that seeks to establish illness as a topic for discussion in literature. Delving into considerations of the loneliness and vulnerability experienced by those suffering from illness, as well as aspects of privilege others might have, the essay resounds with an honesty and clarity that still rings true today.
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Seitenzahl: 37
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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On Being Ill
virginia woolf
renard press
Renard Press Ltd
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London EC1V 2NX
United Kingdom
020 8050 2928
www.renardpress.com
On Being Ill first published in 1926
This edition first published by Renard Press Ltd in 2022
Edited text © Renard Press Ltd, 2022
Extra Material © Renard Press Ltd, 2022
Cover design by Will Dady
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On Being Ill
Considering how common illness is, 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, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s armchair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth – rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us – when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia; lyrics to toothache. But no – with a few exceptions: De Quincey attempted something of the sort in The Opium Eater;* there must be a volume or two about disease scattered through the pages of Proust – literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind, that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions, such as desire and greed, is null, and negligible and non-existent. On the contrary: the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes, blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours, turns to wax in the warmth of June, hardens to tallow in the murk of February. The creature within can only gaze through the pane – smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe: the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul (it is said) escapes. But of all this daily drama of the body there is no record. People write always of the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how the mind has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher’s turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which the body wages, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the
