Status Updates From On Being Ill with Notes fro...

“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 Mallarmé 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..”

i just thought this would be really funny to read rn

distinguishing between between the body's role and the mind's as she connects love & illness, has got to be my favourite pragmatic take on health. maybe we do need a new hierarchy of passions.

“(most, good) literature does it's 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, negligible and non existent. on the contrary: the very opposite is true”
page 1 & i'm sat

„english, which can express the thoughts of hamlet and the tragedy of lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache.“

exactly, woolf.

i love this so much—but i feel like i need to read it at least five times. woolf’s style is just so dense and dramatic.