On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf

Woolf herself was ambivalent about “On Being Ill,” and about its opening sentence.

“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

With the final how we may reasonably expect that the grammatical, argumentative, and symbolic denouement is just around the comma-swiveling corner

Everything that rises must converge, or not.

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 a

On the one hand: “Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts

Four years after it first appeared, Woolf reprinted “On Being Ill”

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

The essay ends in a kind of dream—with the image of a plush red curtain clasped and crushed in grief. And we’re happy to follow Woolf there, in part, because of that dash in her opening sentence, which denotes a passage from the dream-fugue of sickness, depression, and undirected reading into the dirigible madness of writing.