Anna B

Finding meaning in something random was described by researchers as an important factor in the formation of paranormal and delusional beliefs, and has been found to be implicated in vulnerability to schizophrenia.

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

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.

It is the highest thing. Jesus agrees, proclaiming himself at John 14:6 to be the way, the truth and the life.

Loneliness arises when thought is divorced from reality, when the common world has been replaced by the tyranny of coercive logical demands.

” and it’s hard to think of a verbal array whose structure better mimics both its subject and the larger text of which it’s part: precisely because, despite its exquisitely shaped adventure, the sentence finally fails to hold itself together.

“It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.”

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

There’s a contradiction, not quite buried, in the way the essay characterizes the sick person’s experience of language