Wise Words from VW (by Laura Orem)

from "On Being Ill" by Virginia Woolf:

 

We need the poets to imagine for us...Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts.We cannot command all our faculties and keep our reason and our judgement and our memory at attention while chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles into place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the next, until the whole structure - arches, towers, and battlements, stands firm on its foundations...On the other hand, with responsibility shelved and reason in the abeyance - for who is going to exact criticism from an invalid or sound sense from the bed-ridden? - other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind...

...In illness, words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gathering instinctively this, that, and the other - a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause - which the poet, knowing words to be meagre in comparison with ideas, has strewn about his page to evoke, when collected, a state of mind that neither words can express nor the reason explain. Incomprehensibility has enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow. 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 poems of Mallarme 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.

Comments

[Amy A.]

I like this! Thank you, Laura----

[Grace Cavalieri]

Laura Illuminates, Always.