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mariafernandagama's review
5.0
Brilliant and timely, especially after what we've all been through with covid - we witnessed the army of the upright stopped in its tracks and forced to look at the sky, after all. But that's not all, there's a true timelessness here that I think would make it feel current and urgent in any decade. I'll surely revisit it many times in the years to come.
snapier's review against another edition
fast-paced
3.0
A short essay with some interesting points, but I wish it was longer.
kerrygibbons's review
3.0
This was MOSTLY a reflection on what you should read while under the weather (I think), a little on why no one writes about sickness (no longer true), and a TINY bit on being ill.
e333mily's review against another edition
4.0
“Literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear…the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes…The creature within can only gaze through the pane — smudged or rosy; it cannot separate off from the body.”
“The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”
“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.”
“In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause.”
“The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.”
“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.”
“In illness words seem to possess a mystic quality. We grasp what is beyond their surface meaning, gather instinctively this, that, and the other—a sound, a colour, here a stress, there a pause.”