Anna B

So what would a prose literature devoted to illness sound like? Perhaps it could only exist in the form of the essay, of which genre Woolf’s opening sentence is both an elegant part-for-whole and a less than obvious parody.

we embark on a mysterious paratactic excursion, with no punctuation and no hint, for what seems an age, that our destination is the dentist’s chair: “we go down… and feel … and wake … and come to the surface … and confuse…” Everything tends toward the sentence’s second and final dash—the first dash, the dentist’s, may as well be any instrument at

What happens to a society that loses its capacity for awe and wonder at things to come?

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.

The End and the Beginning

By Wisława Szymborska

After every war

someone has to clean up.

Things won’t

straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble

to the side of the road,

so the corpse-filled wagons

can pass.

Someone has to get mired

in scum and ashes,

sofa springs,

splintered glass,

and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder

to prop

Mindfulness is not about achieving or gaining, it’s about acceptance and the relinquishing of material desire. When you’re charging $10 a month with the promise of a ‘better life’, can you really be holding true to that compassionate and egalitarian vision?

“If people cannot write well, they cannot think well, and if they cannot think well, others will do their thinking for them.” - George Orwell