"Woman Lying on a Bench" Carl Larsson |
Having been felled by a nasty bronchial cough for
the last week or so, I have been thinking about the no-man’s-land that separates
the sick from the well. I am fortunate because I have every expectation and
hope of being healthy again in a few more days, but others with more serious conditions
face the prospect of never crossing back over to that chasm to the land of the
heedless well. Conscious of this and of my own good fortune, I try not to mind
the symptoms that sap my energy and cause me to lose valuable time. I try to
see it as an experience that is as legitimate and valuable a state of being as
any other and, as such, just as worthy a subject to be written about.
In her 1926 essay, On
Being Ill, Virginia Woolf marveled that illness had not become a popular
theme in literature.
“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 light...it becomes
strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, 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; ... 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."
But it is true that illness does produce “undiscovered
countries” in our feverish dreams and in our long strange bedridden hours where
the world goes on without us. Even as our body lies fallow and weak, our subconscious
is a riot of fertility, a tangled rainforest of images and ideas for us to use when
we finally get enough strength back to sit at our desks. It is a writer’s great consolation for these lost days
marooned on the island of the ill.