“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 flavor, 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” (“On Being Ill” 22).
In “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf walks a fine line between engaging with the value of illness, as a human physical experience, and romanticizing it. She begins by claiming that “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” (4). This an unforgivable gap, Woolf argues, since the body is not separable from the soul and is constantly affecting it, until death. Woolf’s project, in “On Being Ill,” is to begin filling this gap and exploring what the sensations of illness, and the experience of the ill body, might contribute to our understanding of literature, of the world.
I see this as an admirable goal, and she thoughtfully articulates a philosophy of illness as a different type of lived experience. Yet, I wish to question whether there might be moments where Woolf is guilty of over-romanticizing the experience of illness. Take the beginning quote here, for example. Woolf’s description of the sensory experience of poetry, as made possible through illness, supposes that an ill person has access to poetry, or Latin, or Greek, during their time of illness. This seems, to me, like a class-based experience. The reality for many people struggling with sickness is not one that has any capacity for reading poetry. I don’t mean to say that Woolf believes this is a universal characteristic of illness, but rather almost a metaphor for what sensory poetry reading would prioritize. However, I still see it as a potential problem to base our engagement with illness on this ideal without critique.
I have also seen romanticized, class-based ideas when it comes to making meaning from the experience of self-isolation in 2020. Many people are writing on social media about how they have learned about slowing down the pace of their lives, about practicing different kinds of quality time with their family, about being conscious of how things we’ve given up during this pandemic are things we shouldn’t strive to replace in our lives when this is over. While certainly valid feelings, and meaningful take-aways for many people, they are perhaps forgetting that for many people, the act of self-isolation is not one that is conducive to this kind of introspection and self-improvement.
The people for whom this quarantine is not an extra opportunity for self-care are the essential workers whose jobs have grown more demanding, not less. Or the parents whose children no longer have school or daycare options, who are still trying to hold down jobs, whether at home or in an essential business. When something that is causing irreparable damage to one person is discussed as a trite blessing in the life of another, it is painful, not profound. Calls to be grateful, in the midst of this pandemic, can seem like erasure of the hardships that some are experiencing.
What is always important to remember is the way trials, whether sickness or quarantine, affect us differently based on the ways we show up in the world. We can take many lessons from our unique experiences of life, but we must be cautious in how we present those lessons to the world.
Your epiphanies might be personal, not universal.