added by Anna B · updated 18d ago
On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf
“Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, 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 light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of tem
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Anna B added 2mo ago
Here is what happens in 1930 to the first sentence of 1926: very little, almost nothing. There are some small changes to punctuation, as when “arm chair” acquires a hyphen. In a sentence that is governed in its opening lines by the (somewhat confusing) play of light and dark, Woolf avoids a minor repetition when she writes “what wastes and deserts
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Anna B added 2mo ago
“literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear, and, save for one or two passions such as desire and greed, is null, negligible and nonexisent.” We lack a language to capture “this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain,” and if we t
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Anna B added 2mo ago
With the final how we may reasonably expect that the grammatical, argumentative, and symbolic denouement is just around the comma-swiveling corner
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Anna B added 2mo ago
Woolf herself was ambivalent about “On Being Ill,” and about its opening sentence.
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Anna B added 2mo ago
Four years after it first appeared, Woolf reprinted “On Being Ill”
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Anna B added 2mo ago
It may well be the sentence that for diverse reasons—because thinking about Woolf, or sickness, or essays, because trying to emulate a certain rhythm in my own writing—I’ve copied out by hand more than any other.
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Anna B added 2mo ago
She took the opportunity to rein in what must have seemed syntactic and figural excesses in the work. In a passage about the invalid’s attitude to poetry, the 1930 version state
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Anna B added 2mo ago
There’s a contradiction, not quite buried, in the way the essay characterizes the sick person’s experience of language
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Anna B added 2mo ago