The Undiscovered Country of Illness

Francine Prose calls this sentence of 181 words, written by Virginia Woolf: “one of the most complex and virtuosic sentences in all of 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.

--from Virginia Woolf in "On Being Ill”

We Get Deeper--a Benefit of Pain

On March 14  David Brooks wrote a beautiful column about how we find and develop depth in a life. WE all want depth, yes? BUt the things that depend us? Well, maybe not so much. But character, we ant that. And intellectual depth, we want that too. But "deepening" comes thru experiences that often are hard--disciplines and sometimes the discipline is illness or grief. These are processes we know in CancerLand. 

Here is a paragraph from Brooks March 14th column called "The Deepest Self":

So much of our own understanding of our depth occurs later in life, also amid suffering. The theologian Paul Tillich has a great essay in “Shaking the Foundations” in which he observes that during moments of suffering, people discover they are not what they appeared to be. The suffering scours away a floor inside themselves, exposing a deeper level, and then that floor gets scoured away and another deeper level is revealed. Finally, people get down to the core wounds and the core loves.

And here is the link to the whole essay in the New York Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/14/opinion/brooks-the-deepest-self.html