![]() They hold our tender, often sleeping babies. They hold our tender, often broken hearts. “But with the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle,” Woolf writes, illustrating how the body constantly intervenes, forcing us to reckon time and again with the inescapable poverty of language. Woolf continues, describing how a young girl in love can parallel her romantic experience to Shakespeare and Keats but “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.” We demonstrate our commitment, our command, when we name the unnamed. After all, to vocalize-pain, love, else-reflects choice to give our attention is also to give our language. I am drawn to the both the visual and the metaphorical movement of this statement. The inadequacy of language to express the true sensations of the body remains a problem because, Woolf asserts, language has grown entirely one way. How are we to voice our suffering when conventional words lamentably, reliably, fall short? I am sitting up today, in the usual state of unequal animation.įor Woolf, and for me as well, the language of suffering is inextricably tied to the incident of suffering a yoke complicated by the poverty of language. ![]() I am writing this partly to test my poor bunch of nerves at the back of my neck-will they hold or give again, as they have done so often? Day after day, year after year, she battled headaches, depression, anxiety a “tired heart” her doctor once concluded. Her diaries, stacked in my office next to the teetering pile of medical records, confirm how the nuanced subject of this essay, the inability of language to adequately describe the errant often overwhelming sensations of our bodies, is not merely fodder for intellectual discourse. The reason for this absence, Woolf believes, is that when it comes to experiencing and expressing illness we are limited by “the poverty of language.”ĭear Virginia, what else have you been keeping from me? 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 brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness… when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. ![]() “Considering how common illness is,” she begins, In this essay, Woolf questions the absence of illness among the major themes of great literature. That familiar feeling of I-should-but-I-don’t shame gave way to near-instant fondness when recently I came across Woolf’s essay “ On Being Ill.” That I favor one genre over another by the same author is not revelation, but in this case, I was caught off guard by the swiftness of my conversion. I take comfort in knowing that creation is an ongoing, human process. I like my art best when it shows the seams, when I see the nicks and imperfections. This is not criticism, merely preference. Truth, it seemed, was presented not discovered along the way. Reading her fiction I was left, for good reason, with the impression that I was admiring a polished, clean work of art exact and flawless. It used to be that I would feel a measure of shame when her name surfaced in books or conversation as if she was someone-a quick witted, independent, literary woman who, like me, happened to live in pain-whose work I should to but never actually did favor. I am not proud to admit this, but I recall picking up Mrs. This realization surprised me because to this point, it is fair to say, reading her fiction has felt more like an endurance test than an enjoyable pastime. Lately, I have discovered a kindred in Virginia Woolf. Even my own medical records, that unruly stack of doctor’s notes and prescriptions and x-rays and referrals towering in the corner, has a role to play in this research.īut back to Virginia and the five sturdy, hardbound volumes of her diary now in my possession. I read Sontag and Didion and Dillard, grateful to find myself amongst women who effectively communicate hurt. I labor my way through dense medical texts. My days are spent taking apart the language we use to communicate suffering, then slowly, hopefully with tact and generosity, putting it back together again. Besides, if I was going to immerse myself in her diary I may as well be caught in the full swirl of her brilliance. I wasn’t planning on buying all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, but the cost of purchasing the entire set was, oddly, similar to the cost of purchasing just the one volume I needed to reference.
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