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katya_m's review against another edition
Se há quem saiba discorrer sobre todo e qualquer assunto, esse alguém é (ou era) Virginia Woolf que, neste ensaio On being ill propõe, essencialmente, que a doença que incapacita o corpo capacita a mente para inteligir o significado para lá da forma.
In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having travelled slowly up with all the bloom upon its wings.
Não está em questão se realmente a liberdade que se granjeia com a doença física (a autora também não especifica até que ponto incapacitante) é qualquer coisa de proveniente do domínio sobrenatural, mas, de certa forma, Woolf não está errada em afirmar que a saúde do nosso corpo comporta tantos mecanismos que nos ocupam, entretêm e ofuscam que é normal no dia a dia, deixar-mo-nos ensombrar por um certo vazio, uma certa dormência para tudo aquilo que em nosso redor nos devia sensibilizar:
In illness(...)we cease to be soldiers in the march of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up-to look, for example, at the sky.
A doença traz uma certa liberdade de pensamento e atuação, faz com que baixemos a guarda, agucemos os sentidos que compensam a inércia e esqueçamos os códigos e normas sociais que nos oprimem no dia a dia:
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.
Por tudo isso, defende a autora, é muito estranho que a literatura, que tanto se ocupa do homem, lhe cante os males da alma e não os do corpo. Por qualquer razão, a clarividência, o esclarecimento espiritual que nos é oferecido quando em mãos com a doença do corpo; os mistérios da sabedoria que se alcança quando o espírito não está obrigado às rotinas mecânicas; por qualquer razão estes não são temas que apelem ao escritor, não são trabalhados na literatura, não são procurados pelos leitores:
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 temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads(...) - when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no.
People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected.
Estas belas reflexões não se esgotam aqui, mas o ponto alto deste ensaio, mais do que fazer pensar, é, sem sombra de dúvida a beleza de uma escrita que Woolf trabalha e domina em seu absoluto proveito e vontade, mesmo com um tema como a doença como fio condutor:
Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts. We cannot command all our faculties and keep our reason and our judgment and our memory at attention while chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles into place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the next, until the whole structure-arches, towers, battlements stands firm on its foundations. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not the book for influenza, nor The Golden Bowl, nor Madame Bovary.(...) - other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters.
In health meaning has encroached upon sound. Our intelligence domineers over our senses. But in illness, with the police off duty, we creep beneath some obscure poem by Mallarmé or Donne, some phrase in Latin or Greek, and the words give out their scent, and ripple like leaves, and chequer us with light and shadow, and then, if at last we grasp the meaning, it is all the richer for having travelled slowly up with all the bloom upon its wings.
Não está em questão se realmente a liberdade que se granjeia com a doença física (a autora também não especifica até que ponto incapacitante) é qualquer coisa de proveniente do domínio sobrenatural, mas, de certa forma, Woolf não está errada em afirmar que a saúde do nosso corpo comporta tantos mecanismos que nos ocupam, entretêm e ofuscam que é normal no dia a dia, deixar-mo-nos ensombrar por um certo vazio, uma certa dormência para tudo aquilo que em nosso redor nos devia sensibilizar:
In illness(...)we cease to be soldiers in the march of the upright; we become deserters. They march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up-to look, for example, at the sky.
A doença traz uma certa liberdade de pensamento e atuação, faz com que baixemos a guarda, agucemos os sentidos que compensam a inércia e esqueçamos os códigos e normas sociais que nos oprimem no dia a dia:
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.
Por tudo isso, defende a autora, é muito estranho que a literatura, que tanto se ocupa do homem, lhe cante os males da alma e não os do corpo. Por qualquer razão, a clarividência, o esclarecimento espiritual que nos é oferecido quando em mãos com a doença do corpo; os mistérios da sabedoria que se alcança quando o espírito não está obrigado às rotinas mecânicas; por qualquer razão estes não são temas que apelem ao escritor, não são trabalhados na literatura, não são procurados pelos leitores:
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 temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads(...) - when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no.
People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilised the universe. They show it ignoring the body in the philosopher's turret; or kicking the body, like an old leather football, across leagues of snow and desert in the pursuit of conquest or discovery. Those great wars which it wages by itself, with the mind a slave to it, in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncome of melancholia, are neglected.
Estas belas reflexões não se esgotam aqui, mas o ponto alto deste ensaio, mais do que fazer pensar, é, sem sombra de dúvida a beleza de uma escrita que Woolf trabalha e domina em seu absoluto proveito e vontade, mesmo com um tema como a doença como fio condutor:
Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts. We cannot command all our faculties and keep our reason and our judgment and our memory at attention while chapter swings on top of chapter, and, as one settles into place, we must be on the watch for the coming of the next, until the whole structure-arches, towers, battlements stands firm on its foundations. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire is not the book for influenza, nor The Golden Bowl, nor Madame Bovary.(...) - other tastes assert themselves; sudden, fitful, intense. We rifle the poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters.
floatwiththesticks's review against another edition
5.0
"We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn, irresponsible and disinterested and able, perhaps for the first time for years, to look round, to look up - to look, for example, at the sky."
I could cry at this. It so resonates with everything I've written about illness recently.
I could cry at this. It so resonates with everything I've written about illness recently.
laurus_nobilis's review against another edition
4.0
very stream of consciousness (but who's surprised)
beautifully written
lægger bestemt op til videre egen reflektion
beautifully written
lægger bestemt op til videre egen reflektion