(Here’s a wandering, wondering mind! I love the lucidity of Woolf’s best writing and here, in a sentence of 181 words, she thoroughly imagines the ‘foreign lands’ of illness. The ascendancy of the comma over the semi-colon engenders grace and suppresses pontification. Woolf’s reference to ‘the pit of death’ evokes a teasing lightness that ultimately seems painfully sad when we consider Woolf’s own final illness and suicide. )
CONSIDERING how common illness is, how tremen-
dous the spiritual change that it brings, how aston-
ishing, 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 light, what
precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little
rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate
oaks are uprooted in us in 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 his ‘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
an 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.
