Undiscovered Country: The 100th Anniversary of Virgina Woolf’s “On Being Ill”

I was lying in my attic bedroom reading a book, when my husband came up to speak with me. I wriggled over to make room for him and heard a muffled sound like a wet branch snapping. As I stood up, an electric bolt of pain shot down my leg.

Time suspended. After an x-ray, I learned that the disc between L5 and S1 in my lumbar spine had burst, the gelatinous core herniated out, pinning down the nerve root and driving pain down my right hip into my leg. My physiatrist kept insisting that if I used the elliptical on its most difficult setting and did my clam shells, I’d improve.

My life shrunk. Standing up was less painful than sitting. The worst was getting up from a chair. I stood all day, like a horse, at my kitchen counter trying to write in my journal or watching foreign films on my computer. I drank one glass of rose after another and took so much Extra Strength Tylenol that the backs of my hands were sometimes black. My husband made me chicken sandwiches; he did the laundry and the dishes. He helped me in and out of the shower, he tied my shoelaces and held me steady, as I struggled up and down the stairs. His body had changed too, not damaged like mine, but beaten down by the grim inevitability of what our future might hold.

I became a shut in; as unbalanced and careening as a listing ship. My friends had to come to me. They listened while I detailed what had happened. Terror showed in their faces and I understood in order not to strain and fray my connection to them; I could neither be honest about what I felt nor complain. This effort at first exhausted me and eventually made me angry.

I needed to be alone to contemplate the reality of my damaged body and decide, if the pain persisted, whether I wanted to live or not.

I decided to go upstate to our ramshackle cottage in Long Eddy, New York, not far from the Delaware River. I hoped to heal closer to nature. But my motives, I can see now, were more complicated; I needed to be alone to contemplate the reality of my damaged body and decide, if the pain persisted, whether I wanted to live or not.

In 1925, as Woolf wrote “On Being Ill” she was recovering from a fainting spell and an episode of her periodic depression. The influenza epidemic had flared up again, infecting less people but still killing many of them. As Woolf recovered, she felt her illness had “loosened the earth around the roots of her creativity.” Illness, she wrote, changed the world dramatically for sufferers. “When the lights of health go down…what wastes and deserts of the soul.” Her essay argues that this change is so remarkable that more books should focus on what the body does to the mind rather than what the mind does to the body. “Those great wars which the body wages with the mind…in the solitude of the bedroom against the assault of fever or the oncoming melancholia, are neglected.”

What are the phases of this transformation? Woolf wrote that sickness “pierces the trance of busyness and obligation, it awakens us to the world around us.” And at first, in Long Eddy, standing on my porch listening to audio books and watching the furry creatures in my yard, I did feel, while not healed, a certain helpful dilation. My bird feeder had been attacked the year before by a bear and so whenever it swung out at a particular angle, sunflower seeds poured out like candy from a piñata. Cardinals, bluejays and a nut hatch skittered down to enjoy the feast. Squirrels, both grey and red, gathered as well as the shy rabbit that lived in the raspberry bramble. Chipmunks stuffed seeds in their mouths until their cheeks bulged and then dashed down into their burrow beside the lilac bush.

At times nature did take notice of me.

Finally, I had the focus, as Woolf says, “to see.” As robins pulled worms up out of the dirt like tiny sausages, I conducted projects unthinkable in my pain-free life. I drew up a chart of the squirrels that lived in the yard and found, through careful observation, that there were not two as I had suspected but five. One had a lopped off tail, another with larger ears then her colleagues, a third started all the squabbles, a fourth’s front paw hung down when he sat on his back legs as if showing someone an engagement ring, and the fifth was fat.

Sadly, my communion with God’s creatures did not put an end to my suffering. At least once a week I drove wailing to the Emergency Room and begged for aspirin with codeine, the strongest pain reliever on offer, during the opioid crisis. At night, pain smashed my sleep into ragged chunks. Without my husband to hold me up, I had to crawl to the bathroom on all fours.

Unable to sleep I watched a skunk family file out of my foundation. I had tried everything to get rid of them, traps, caulking up the gaps between the stones, though I am ashamed to admit it, even poison. “Skunks have always lived in your basement,” an elderly neighbor said to me philosophically, “and skunks will always live in your basement.” The small beasts made a beeline for my compost barrel, knocked it over and gnawed on the corn cobs and watermelon rind.

There was something atavistic about the skunks, their ancestors living under my house generation after generation. I felt watching them Woolf’s deeper, darker explanation for why, while indifferent, nature soothes the afflicted. “Inside the transcendent communion with nature,” she wrote, “resides the most disquieting fact of existence—the awareness of an unfeeling universe, unconcerned with our fate.” This indifference calmed and conciliated compared with the weight of my loved one’s concern.

At times nature did take notice of me. Whenever I walked from my porch across my large yard to my car, turkey buzzards, a vulture with a large wing-span and pink fleshy head, began to circle above. At first, I thought this was a coincidence, that they must have smelled a dead squirrel in the woods behind my house. But after a few weeks, their shadows swirling eerily over the grass anytime I was in the yard, I wondered if they’d sensed my vulnerability, my limp like a dying deer’s.

The anchor of my week was physical therapy at the small ten bed hospital in Callicoon, the same place I went to beg for pain relief. The PT area was at the far end of the building, in a room that seemed suspended in the air, with windows looking out at the helicopter landing pad and the Catskill mountains beyond.

One of the therapists, a middle-aged woman with big hair in scrubs covered with teddy bears, worked on a young man, a victim of a car crash. He’d only recently healed enough to move from Florida where his collision had occurred, to his parents’ place upstate. He’d shattered his pelvis, his right hip and both his knees. Bonnie massaged his legs and applied heating pads to his replacement joints. The man, who was clearly in pain, described how when the truck struck his motorcycle, he had seen sky, asphalt, sky, grass, and sky as he spun. He shook his head: “I guess everything happens for a reason.”

His struggle to understand his situation reminded me of pain’s uniqueness; how it contains both the rawest expression of the body’s sensation, along with spiritual and metaphysical questions. Why did this happen? What does my pain mean? Does fate exist? Is there a god? Who am I now? Pain is always combined with an intriguing transcendence of its physical aspect. The microwave beeped, and Bonnie got out large flannel bean bags and laid them over each of the young man’s legs. She did not believe in divine providence. “I believe instead,” she said, “in plain bad luck.”

After my friends left, I was as lonely as I’d ever been in my life.

After a few weeks in the country, I invited friends who lived locally over for dinner. I drove to town, shopped, dragged my groceries across the yard and into the house, chopped, sauteed, laid the table with placemats and cutlery and uncorked the wine. I felt a bitterness that my friends would have no idea what all this had cost me. How I’d needed the kitchen table to prop me up while I worked and the shudder of acute pain as I’d leaned down to lift the chicken out from the roasting pan.

However, as they walked from their cars across my yard, I felt a thrill: as dinged up as I was, I had managed to make dinner! At first, I reveled in the conversation, my friends were lively and smart. We talked about our crazed president and the latest Ryan Gosling movie, subjects I was fluent in. But as the night wore on, I felt increasingly alienated; my friends were able to move their bodies freely; they looked forward to the future. I sat with pain buzzing in my back so fierce I had trouble keeping my features coherent. As the talk turned to Tarot cards and how a divination could teach me about my destiny, I felt myself turning against them.

Woolf understood that those in pain are susceptible to illusion. “This monster,” she writes, “the body, will soon make us taper into mysticism, or rise, with rapid beats of wings into the rapture of transcendentalism.” It is assumed by believers that religion comes down from above, but if God exists, human bodies made him. The idea of the supernatural felt disrespectful to the stark reality of a damaged body like mine.

After my friends left, I was as lonely as I’d ever been in my life. I went out and sat on the porch. The birds and little animals were gone, and it was still too early for the skunks to come out. A sphinx moth bashed its narrow wings so violently against the little lamp by the door that dander flew up. I turned the switch off and the moth launched out into the yard flying over the blue-black grass and the little white flowers of the spirea bush. Again, somehow, one saw life, a pure bead.

Woolf called illness, “the great confessional,” a rare space where “truths are blurted out.” But I had found her truths existential, and almost impossible to bear: “…how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads…”

Is it possible to hope for transcendence amid the terrors of the body? Woolf admits it takes a superhuman effort “a reason rooted to the bowels of the earth,” but she also recognizes a generative power in her suffering. “In its lava I still find most of the things I write about.” She encourages us to see the suffering body as meaningful, dynamic, mysterious. “…the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear…” Pain’s singularity, she argues, can allow us into undiscovered worlds, it can even generate a new language. “Taking the pain in one hand,” Woolf writes, “and a lump of pure sound in the other…(we)crush them together, so that a brand-new word in the end drops out…”

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