On Being Ill

I’ve had a cold this week. It’s just a cold—but even as I write that sentence, I resent it. It is just a cold: the doctor ruled out Covid pretty quickly, with a test. But it’s easy to forget, when we’re healthy for months on end, how enervating, debilitating, and downright miserable a mere cold can be.

As Virginia Woolf notes in her astonishing essay “On Being Ill” (1926), our language and literature are impoverished when it comes to portraying and describing illness. There are novels in which we wait anxiously alongside our protagonist for a loved one to live or die. (I’m thinking of Lizzie Bennet watching over Jane at Mr. Bingley’s house, realizing how very lonely she will be if Jane dies of her fever. Or readers in both America and Britain holding their breath to find out whether Dickens’ Little Nell dies. But it’s rare that we see illness portrayed from the inside.

There are a few exceptions. Woolf mentions De Quincey’s The Opium Eater. I think of Esther Summerson’s bout of smallpox in Bleak House. (She hallucinates being a part of a “flaming necklace,” and her recovery is beautifully told.) Tolstoy is a master at such scenes: in two exquisite, powerful passages of War and Peace, Prince Andre suffers battle wounds–first on the battlefield of Austerlitz (where he lies stunned and wondering at the huge sky arching overhead) and then on the retreat from Moscow (where an infected stomach wound makes him hallucinate a white sphinx in his room). The “English Patient” of Ondaatje’s novel has also been injured in wartime, but we share his experience visually, almost without reference to physical pain. Here’s the Patient’s exquisite vision of a desert healer, who travels with glass bottles of medicine dangling from a wooden yoke: “A wave of glass, an archangel, all the ointments within the bottles warmed from the sun, so when they were rubbed onto skin they seemed to be heated especially for a wound. Behind him was translated light–blues and other colors shivering in the haze and sand.” It gives us the beauty of hallucination and fragmented vision, but not the pain of burned skin. On the other hand, Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” does give us the body in surrealistic mode, as ugly and unintelligible as a beetle.

While Woolf laments our lack of great literature about illness, she herself uses the essay to writes astonishingly about it. Here’s a truncated version of her brilliant but almost-over-the-top first sentence. (I’ve omitted a long rhapsody, with more subordinate clauses, about the dentist.)

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 bring to light, what precipices and laws sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals . . . , when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

(My favorite moment is that little aside towards the end: “as we are so frequently forced to think of it.” With her periodic bouts of mental illness, Woolf was indeed forced to think of it frequently.)

After that tour de force of a sentence, Woolf goes on to claim–extravagantly–that we ought to have novels about influenza and epic poems to typhoid. She forecasts a new language for the poetry we would need to convey the experience: “primitive, subtle, sensuous, obscene.” And she makes a good literary case for the tempestuous quality of illness.

Even with my very ordinary cold, there were moments when I felt as though I was staggering along through some gray, barren landscape, on a forced march with no beginning I could remember or end I could visualize. Once I’m well, there will be the inevitable days of catching up on all the tasks I’ve deferred. But in between, there’s always a lovely moment when I’m just starting to recover, when the world presents itself as new and delicate. Morning light and leaf-shaped shadows move across the wall, and I’m content to watch them without criticism or judgment. On a fine afternoon, I step outside, sniff the fresh air, and settle into a chair on the back terrace. I carry an undemanding book that I will read in the September afternoon, with the trees stirring in a light breeze and the sun pleasantly warm on my legs. No one, even myself, expects me to do anything useful. No one, even myself, expects me to be clever. I am relaxed in the little boat of my body, carried along on a gentle current of returning health.

So, yes, we could do more with illness than we’ve done in the past. Yet you really can’t make novels of influenza. Or rather, you can’t make novels focused exclusively on the sufferer’s internal experience of the flu. The individual’s bodily and mental experience of illness tends to be isolating, dull for interminable stretches of time, and (except for stoic endurance) non-heroic. It’s too passive an experience for long narratives. Novels–even experimental novels–need social interactions, choices, and action.

Covid has supplied many dramatic interactions, and there are probably novels about it already in the works. (Memoirs, too.) They’ll include vivid, moving scenes in the ICU, maybe even told from the perspective of the suffering patient. But there will also be doctors and nurses who spiral into despair or who catch the disease themselves, families who are bankrupted by the loss of their jobs and health insurance, social workers who tend to the homeless, volunteers for the vaccine trials, and so forth.

I hope at least one of these novels coming our way is brilliant.