Friday, November 12, 2010

Thoughts on "On Being Ill"

When I’m sick, I prefer to curl into a ball under the covers and stay there until I feel better, which is probably why I am not a famous author. Woolf never ceases to write even when she is stuck in bed. She experiments with this idea of using illness as a new genre of writing; she uses it to express how she perceives the world while she is sick. She seems to be in an alternate state of intenseness; almost as if she is intense on an unconscious level. Her mind seems to be functioning on a different wavelength. What she says is valid but tends to ramble. But is that not what we do when we are sick? When loved ones visit us on our sick beds we talk to them for as long as they will hear us out. Perhaps it is because we are so deprived of human contact that we want to blurt everything out while we have someone sitting there or perhaps our minds really do function differently while we are ill.

Woolf allows her mind to wander where ever it wishes while she is writing this piece. She jumps from one subject to the next yet somehow it all connects. It almost seems as though she simply let her thoughts go and then tried to keep up with them on paper. This makes me wonder whether or not she succeeded in getting it all down or how much she had to leave out to get the bigger ideas down. I wonder how much she altered/edited this work from its original state before publishing it. Would she want it to remain in its original state to truly reflect the mind set of one who is ill or would she want to clean it up a bit before allowing others to read it?

No comments:

Post a Comment