# 2026-01-29 - On Being Ill by Virginia Woolf
I found this essay by Virginia Woolf through a news item posted by
Project Gutenberg. I have been acquiring a taste for her writing.
She writes with a deep and forceful style, and has a knack for
expressing heavy concepts using graceful, poetic language.
For example, in this essay she remarks about how people are generally
incapable of true empathy because they don't even know their own
soul. Lacking self awareness, it is impossible for them to fully
relate to another person's experience. I loved how she put it though,
that our own minds are virgin forests and snow fields undisturbed
even by the footprints of birds. In Star Trek parlance, boldly or
not, each of us is going where no person has gone before.
Ironically, i can totally relate to her preference to go it alone in
illness. When i feel ill and miserable, i would rather crawl in some
hole somewhere and either die or recover. Only when well do i have
even a smidgeon of extroversive energy.
I loved her meditations on the sky & cloud forms and the flowers &
plants in illness. How they are beautiful but starkly and utterly
impersonal. Perhaps a poet is happier not knowing; or knowing the
full indifference of nature, perhaps a poet would feel liberated.
Below is the full text of the essay 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 arm-chair and confuse [their] "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 face
would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason
rooted in the bowels of the earth. Short of these, this monster, the
body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism,
or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of
transcendentalism. The public would say that a novel devoted to
influenza lacked plot; they would complain that there was no love in
it--wrongly however, for illness often takes on the disguise of love,
and plays the same odd tricks. It invests certain faces with
divinity, sets us to wait, hour after hour, with pricked ears for the
creaking of a stair, and wreathes the faces of the absent (plain
enough in health, Heaven knows) with a new significance, while the
mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it
has neither time nor taste in health. Finally, to hinder the
description of illness in literature, there is the poverty of the
language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the
tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. It has
all grown one way. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has
Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer
try to describe a pain in [their] head to a doctor and language at
once runs dry. There is nothing ready made for [them]. [They are]
forced to coin words [themself], and, taking [their] pain in one
hand, and a lump of pure sound in the other (as perhaps the people of
Babel did in the beginning), so to crush them together that a brand
new word in the end drops out. Probably it will be something
laughable. For who of English birth can take liberties with the
language? To us it is a sacred thing and therefore doomed to die,
unless the Americans, whose genius is so much happier in the making
of new words than in the disposition of the old, will come to our
help and set the springs aflow. Yet it is not only a new language
that we need, more primitive, more sensual, more obscene, but a new
hierarchy of the passions; love must be deposed in favour of a
temperature of 104; jealousy give place to the pangs of sciatica;
sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero become a white
liquid with a sweet taste that mighty Prince with the moths' eyes and
the feathered feet, one of whose names is Chloral.
But to return to the invalid. "I am in bed with influenza"--but what
does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed
its shape; the tools of business grown remote; the sounds of festival
become romantic like a merry-go-round heard across far fields; and
friends have changed, some putting on a strange beauty, others
deformed to the squatness of toads, while the whole landscape of life
lies remote and fair, like, the shore seen from a ship far out at
sea, and [they are] now exalted on a peak and needs no help from man
or God, and now grovels supine on the floor glad of a kick from a
housemaid--the experience cannot be imparted and, as is always the
way with these dumb things, [their] own suffering serves but to wake
memories in [their] friends' minds of their influenzas, their aches
and pains which went unwept last February, and now cry aloud,
desperately, clamorously, for the divine relief of sympathy.
But sympathy we cannot have. Wisest Fate says no. If her children,
weighted as they already are with sorrow, were to take on them that
burden too, adding in imagination other pains to their own, buildings
would cease to rise; roads would peter out into grassy tracks; there
would be an end of music and of painting; one great sigh alone would
rise to Heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be
those of horror and despair. As it is, there is always some little
distraction--an organ grinder at the corner of the hospital, a shop
with book or trinket to decoy one past the prison or the workhouse,
some absurdity of cat or dog to prevent one from turning the old
beggar's hieroglyphic of misery into volumes of sordid suffering; and
thus the vast effort of sympathy which those barracks of pain and
discipline, those dried symbols of sorrow, ask us to exert on their
behalf, is uneasily shuffled off for another time. Sympathy nowadays
is dispensed chiefly by the laggards and failures, women for the most
part (in whom the obsolete exists so strangely side by side with
anarchy and newness), who, having dropped out of the race, have time
to spend upon fantastic and unprofitable excursions; C. L. for
example, who, sitting by the stale sickroom fire, builds up, with
touches at once sober and imaginative, the nursery fender, the loaf,
the lamp, barrel organs in the street, and all the simple old wives'
tales of pinafores and escapades; A. R., the rash, the magnanimous,
who, if you fancied a giant tortoise to solace you or a theorbo to
cheer you, would ransack the markets of London and procure them
somehow, wrapped in paper, before the end of the day; the frivolous
K. T., who, dressed in silks and feathers, powdered and painted
(which takes time too) as if for a banquet of Kings and Queens,
spends her whole brightness in the gloom of the sick room, and makes
the medicine bottles ring and the flames shoot up with her gossip and
her mimicry. But such follies have had their day; civilisation points
to a different goal; and then what place will there be for the
tortoise and the theorbo?
There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional),
a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted
out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals. About
sympathy for example--we can do without it. That illusion of a world
so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied
together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks
another, where however strange your experience other people have had
it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has
been there before you--is all an illusion. We do not know our own
souls, let alone the souls of others. Human beings do not go hand in
hand the whole stretch of the way. There is a virgin forest in each;
a snowfield where even the print of birds' feet is unknown. Here we
go alone, and like it better so. Always to have sympathy, always to
be accompanied, always to be understood would be intolerable. But in
health the genial pretence must be kept up and the effort renewed to
communicate, to civilise, to share, to cultivate the desert, educate
the native, to work together by day and by night to sport. In
illness this make-believe ceases. Directly the bed is called for, or,
sunk deep among pillows in one chair, we raise our feet even an inch
above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of
the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with
the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the
lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first
time for years, to look round, to look up--to look, for example, at
the sky.
The first impression of that extraordinary spectacle is strangely
overcoming. Ordinarily to look at the sky for any length of time is
impossible. Pedestrians would be impeded and disconcerted by a public
sky-gazer. What snatches we get of it are mutilated by chimneys and
churches, serve as a background for man, signify wet weather or fine,
daub windows gold, and, filling in the branches, complete the pathos
of dishevelled autumnal plane trees in autumnal squares. Now, lying
recumbent, staring straight up, the sky is discovered to be something
so different from this that really it is a little shocking. This then
has been going on all the time without our knowing it!--this
incessant making up of shapes and casting them down, this buffeting
of clouds together, and drawing vast trains of ships and wagons from
North to South, this incessant ringing up and down of curtains of
light and shade, this interminable experiment with gold shafts and
blue shadows, with veiling the sun and unveiling it, with making rock
ramparts and wafting them away this endless activity, with the waste
of Heaven knows how many million horse power of energy, has been left
to work its will year in year out. The fact seems to call for comment
and indeed for censure. Ought not some one to write to /The Times/?
Use should be made of it. One should not let this gigantic cinema
play perpetually to an empty house. But watch a little longer and
another emotion drowns the stirrings of civic ardour. Divinely
beautiful it is also divinely heartless. Immeasurable resources are
used for some purpose which has nothing to do with human pleasure or
human profit. If we were all laid prone, stiff, still the sky would
be experimenting with its blues and its golds. Perhaps then, if we
look down at something very small and close and familiar, we shall
find sympathy. Let us examine the rose. We have seen it so often
flowering in bowls, connected it so often with beauty in its prime,
that we have forgotten how it stands, still and steady, throughout an
entire afternoon in the earth. It preserves a demeanour of perfect
dignity and self-possession. The suffusion of its petals is of
inimitable rightness. Now perhaps one deliberately falls; now all the
flowers, the voluptuous purple, the creamy, in whose waxen flesh the
spoon has left a swirl of cherry juice; gladioli; dahlias; lilies,
sacerdotal, ecclesiastical; flowers with prim cardboard collars
tinged apricot and amber, all gently incline their heads to the
breeze all, with the exception of the heavy sunflower, who proudly
acknowledges the sun at midday and perhaps at midnight rebuffs the
moon. There they stand; and it is of these, the stillest, the most
self-sufficient of all things that human beings have made companions
these that symbolise their passions, decorate their festivals, and
lie (as if they knew sorrow) upon the pillows of the dead. Wonderful
to relate, poets have found religion in nature; people live in the
country to learn virtue from plants. It is in their indifference that
they are comforting. That snowfield of the mind, where man has not
trodden, is visited by the cloud, kissed by the falling petal, as, in
another sphere, it is the great artists, the Miltons and the Popes,
who console not by their thought of us but by their forgetfulness.
Meanwhile, with the heroism of the ant or the bee, however
indifferent the sky or disdainful the flowers, the army of the
upright marches to battle. Mrs. Jones catches her train. Mr. Smith
mends his motor. The cows are driven home to be milked. [People]
thatch the roof. The dogs bark. The rooks, rising in a net, fall in a
net upon the elm trees. The wave of life flings itself out
indefatigably. 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 factory and
engine; the sun will go out. Even so, when the whole earth is sheeted
and slippery, some undulation, some irregularity of surface will mark
the boundary of an ancient garden, and there, thrusting its head up
undaunted in the starlight, the rose will flower, the crocus will
burn. But with the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle. We
cannot stiffen peaceably into glassy mounds. Even the recumbent
spring up at the mere imagination of frost about the toes and stretch
out to avail themselves of the universal hope: Heaven, Immortality.
Surely, since men have been wishing all these ages, they will have
wished something into existence; there will be some green isle for
the mind to rest on even if the foot cannot plant itself there. The
co-operative imagination of mankind must have drawn some firm
outline. But no. One opens the /Morning Post/ and reads the Bishop of
Lichfield on Heaven. One watches the church-goers file into those
gallant temples where, on the bleakest day, in the wettest fields,
lamps will be burning, bells will be ringing, and however the autumn
leaves may shuffle and the winds sigh outside, hopes and desires will
be changed to beliefs and certainties within. Do they look serene?
Are their eyes filled with the light of their supreme conviction?
Would one of them dare leap straight into Heaven off Beachy Head?
None but a simpleton would ask such questions; the little company of
believers lags and drags and strays. The mother is worn; the father
tired. As for imagining Heaven, they have no time. Heaven-making must
be left to the imagination of the poets. Without their help we can
but trifle imagine Pepys in Heaven, adumbrate little interviews with
celebrated people on tufts of thyme, soon fall into gossip about such
of our friends as have stayed in Hell, or, worse still, revert again
to earth and choose, since there is no harm in choosing, to live over
and over, now as man, now as woman, as sea-captain, or court lady, as
Emperor or farmer's wife, in splendid cities and on remote moors, at
the time of Pericles or Arthur, Charlemagne or George the Fourth--to
live and live till we have lived out those embryo lives which attend
about us in early youth until "I" suppressed them. But "I" shall not,
if wishing can alter it, usurp Heaven too, and condemn us, who have
played our parts here as William or Alice, to remain William or Alice
for ever. Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the
poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-making should be attached
to the office of the Poet Laureate,
Indeed it is to the poets that we turn. Illness makes us disinclined
for the long campaigns that prose exacts. We cannot command all our
faculties and keep our reason and our judgment and our memory at
attention while chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles
into place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the next, until
the whole structure--arches, towers, and battlements--stands firm on
its foundations. /The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire/ is not
the book for influenza, nor /The Golden Bowl/ nor /Madame Bovary/. On
the other hand, with responsibility shelved and reason in the
abeyance--for who is going to exact criticism from an invalid or
sound sense from the bed-ridden?--other tastes assert themselves;
sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We
break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind:
and oft at eve
Visits the herds along the twilight meadows
wandering in thick flocks along the mountains
Shepherded by the slow unwilling wind.
Or there is a whole three volume novel to be mused over in a verse of
Hardy's or a sentence of La Bruyere. We dip in Lamb's Letters some
prose writers are to be read as poets and find "I am a sanguinary
murderer of time, and would kill him inchmeal just now. But the snake
is vital", and who shall explain the delight? or open Rimbaud and
read
O saisons o châteaux
Quelle dme est sans difauts?
and who shall rationalise the charm? In illness words seem to possess
a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning,
gather instinctively this, that, and the other--a sound, a colour,
here a stress, there a pause--which the poet, knowing words to be
meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke,
when collected, a state of mind which neither words can express nor
the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us
in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. In
health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers
over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep
beneath some obscure poem by Mallarme or Donne, some phrase in Latin
or Greek, and the words give out their scent and distil their
flavour, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the
richer for having come to us sensually first, by way of the palate
and the nostrils, like some queer odour. Foreigners, to whom the
tongue is strange, have us at a disadvantage. The Chinese must know
the sound of /Antony and Cleopatra/ better than we do.
Rashness is one of the properties of illness--outlaws that we
are--and it is rashness that we need in reading Shakespeare. It is
not that we should doze in reading him, but that, fully conscious and
aware, his fame intimidates and bores, and all the views of all the
critics dull in us that thunder-clap of conviction which, if an
illusion, is still so helpful an illusion, so prodigious a pleasure,
so keen a stimulus in reading the great. Shakespeare is getting
flyblown; a paternal government might well forbid writing about him,
as they put his monument at Stratford beyond the reach of scribbling
fingers. With all this buzz of criticism about, one may hazard one's
conjectures privately, make one's notes in the margin; but, knowing
that someone has said it before, or said it better, the zest is gone.
Illness, in its kingly sublimity, sweeps all that aside and leaves
nothing but Shakespeare and oneself. What with his overweening power
and our overweening arrogance, the barriers go down, the knots run
smooth, the brain rings and resounds with /Lear/ or /Macbeth/ and
even Coleridge himself squeaks like a distant mouse.
But enough of Shakespeare--let us turn to Augustus Hare. There are
people who say that even illness does not warrant these transitions;
that the author of /The Story of Two Noble Lives/ is not the peer of
Boswell; and if we assert that short of the best in literature we
like the worst--it is mediocrity that is hateful--we will have none
of that either. So be it. The law is on the side of the normal. But
for those who suffer a slight rise of temperature the names of Hare
and Waterford and Canning ray out as beams of benignant lustre. Not,
it is true, for the first hundred pages or so. There, as so often in
these fat volumes, we flounder and threaten to sink in a plethora of
aunts and uncles. We have to remind ourselves that there is such a
thing as atmosphere; that the masters themselves often keep us
waiting intolerably while they prepare our minds for whatever it may
be--the surprise, or the lack of surprise. So Hare, too, takes his
time; the charm steals upon us imperceptibly; by degrees we become
almost one of the family, yet not quite, for our sense of the oddity
of it all remains, and share the family dismay when Lord Stuart
leaves the room--there was a ball going forward and is next heard of
in Iceland. Parties, he said, bored him--such were English
aristocrats before marriage with intellect had adulterated the fine
singularity of their minds. Parties bore them; they are off to
Iceland. Then Beckford's mania for castle building attacked him; he
must lift a French /château/ across the Channel, and erect pinnacles
and towers to use as servants' bedrooms at vast expense, upon the
borders of a crumbling cliff, too, so that the housemaids saw their
brooms swimming down the Solent, and Lady Stuart was much distressed,
but made the best of it and began, like the high-born lady that she
was, planting evergreens in the face of ruin. Meanwhile the
daughters, Charlotte and Louisa, grew up in their incomparable
loveliness, with pencils in their hands, for ever sketching, dancing,
flirting, in a cloud of gauze. They are not very distinct it is true.
For life then was not the life of Charlotte and Louisa. It was the
life of families, of groups. It was a web, a net, spreading wide and
enmeshing every sort of cousin, dependant, and old retainer.
Aunts--Aunt Caledon, Aunt Mexborough--grandmothers--Granny Stuart,
Granny Hardwicke--cluster in chorus, and rejoice and sorrow and eat
Christmas dinner together, and grow very old and remain very upright,
and sit in hooded chairs cutting flowers it seems out of coloured
paper. Charlotte married Canning and went to India; Louisa married
Lord Waterford and went to Ireland. Then letters begin to cross vast
spaces in slow sailing ships and communication becomes still more
protracted and verbose, and there seems no end to the space and the
leisure of those early Victorian days, and faiths are lost and the
life of Hedley Vicars revives them; aunts catch cold but recover;
cousins marry; there are the Irish famine and the Indian Mutiny, and
both sisters remain to their great, but silent, grief without
children to come after them. Louisa, dumped down in Ireland with
Lord Waterford at the hunt all day, was often very lonely; but she
stuck to her post, visited the poor, spoke words of comfort ("I am
sorry indeed to hear of Anthony Thompson's loss of mind, or rather of
memory; if, however, he can understand sufficiently to trust solely
in our Saviour, he has enough") and sketched and sketched. Thousands
of notebooks were filled with pen and ink drawings of an evening, and
then the carpenter stretched sheets for her and she designed frescoes
for schoolrooms, had live sheep into her bedroom, draped gamekeepers
in blankets, painted Holy Families in abundance, until the great
Watts exclaimed that here was Titian's peer and Raphael's master! At
that Lady Waterford laughed (she had a generous, benignant sense of
humour); and said that she was nothing but a sketcher; had scarcely
had a lesson in her life witness her angel's wings scandalously
unfinished. Moreover, there was her father's house forever falling
into the sea; she must shore it up; must entertain her friends; must
fill her days with all sorts of charities, till her Lord came home
from hunting, and then, at midnight often, she would sketch him with
his knightly face half hidden in a bowl of soup, sitting with her
sketch-book under a lamp beside him. Off he would ride again, stately
as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think
each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was, that
winter's morning; his horse stumbled; he was killed. She knew it
before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he
ran downstairs on the day of the burial, the beauty of the great lady
standing to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back, how the
curtain, heavy, mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed
together where she had grasped it in her agony.
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