Anna B

Everything that rises must converge, or not.

Seven times—four hows and three whats —the sentence invites us to anticipate a logically and artistically satisfying terminus

Most significant to those of us interested in the Heroine’s Journey is that for a hero in a Hero’s Journey, a prevailing concept and perpetuated message is that asking for (or needing) help is BAD. Because a hero who asks for help is perceived as weak by the story

ideological thinking insists upon a ‘truer reality’, that is concealed behind the world of perceptible things.

We are building something immense together that, though invisible and immaterial, is a structure, one we reside within—or, rather, many overlapping structures.

What remains? Most of the sentence, and of course the crucial dash, which is the sveltest emblem possible of the license afforded to the sick, to the essayist, and to the sentence itself. “On Being Ill” contains one of Woolf’s boldest essayistic deviations

She has been thinking about Hamlet , and the way rashness, “one of the properties of illness,” allows at last a proper, because “outlaw,” reading of the play’s illogic and excess

It is there that true being dwells, without colour or shape, that cannot be touched; reason alone, the soul’s pilot, can behold it, and all true knowledge is knowledge thereof.’

On the other hand, illness makes us adventurers, in language and imagination; we are pleased to abandon concision and coherence. Above all, so it seems as “On Being Ill” starts to mimic the shape of its own beginning, illness frees us to fall back on the pillows and give up pretending to the logical progression of our thoughts.