I’m revising the syllabus for my class, The Literature of Caregiving, and I found this incredible
sentence written by Virginia Woolf in her book, “On Being Ill.” It is one of
the most virtuostic sentences in all literature:
"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
view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise in
temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the
act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of
annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the
presence of angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the
surface in the dentist’s arm-chair and confuse his “Rinse the mouth-rinse the
mouth” with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to
welcome us—when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of
it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love
and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.
I counted them:
This sentence has 181 words.
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