It is only the recumbent who know what, after all, Nature is at no pains to conceal—that she in the end will conquer;

we raise our feet even an inch above the ground on another, we cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle.

Incomprehensibility has an enormous power over us in illness, more legitimately perhaps than the upright will allow.

The creature within can only gaze through the pane—smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body like the sheath of a knife or the pod of a pea for a single instant; it must go through the whole unending procession of changes, heat and cold, comfort and discomfort, hunger and satisfaction, health and illness, until there comes the inevitabl

Short of these, this monster, the body, this miracle, its pain, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of the wings, into the raptures of transcendentalism.

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

Woolf’s On Being Ill may repudiate her mother’s “art of nursing” in favor of the imaginative possibilities of the “art of being ill.”

Anne Hawkins’s Reconstructing Illness: Studies in Pathography (1993), Arthur Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller: Body, Illness, and Ethics (1995), Thomas Couser’s Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing (1997), and Oliver Sacks’s A Leg to Stand On (1994).

perhaps because illness requires a new language—“more primitive, more sensual, more obscene.”