عُـلا’s Reviews > On Being Ill > Status Update

"we do not know our own souls, let alone souls of others."

"there is, let us confess it, an illness in the great confessional, a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals."

"but sympathy we cannot have, 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 paintings; one great sigh alone would rise to heaven, and the only attitudes for men and women would be those of horror and despair."

"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 favor of a temperature of 104; jealousy gives place to the pangs of sciatica; sleeplessness play the part of villain, and the hero becomes a white liquid with a sweet taste, that mighty prince with the moths' eyes and the feathered feet, one of whose names is chloral."

"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, wreathes the faces of the absent with a new significance, while the mind concocts a thousand legends and romances about them for which it has neither time nor taste and health."

"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."

"those greats war which the body wages with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of the oncome of melancholia, are neglected."

"and illness, until there comes the inevitable catastrophe; the body smashes itself to smithereens, and the soul escapes."

"how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul.. -, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down in 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"