¶ On diverging. Isn’t there a kind of aggregate feeling about the essay, derived from the real life it (mostly) describes? Aggregate, as if dredged up by the bucketload from a gravel pit, or flung together out of waste products, pulverized and repurposed. Here is Gass on the subject: ‘Our experience consists of immense aggregates, which occupy even the most self-effacing and slimmest moments.’ And Woolf on Thomas De Quincey: ‘Scenes come together under his hands like congregations of clouds which gently join and slowly disperse or hang solemnly still.’ Once again the essay reminds us of its particulate nature. But what does that mean at the level of a particular essay’s structure, progression or lack of progression? The greatest rhetorical swerve or digression I know comes late in Woolf’s ‘On Being Ill’, which she wrote while physically and mentally debilitated in the autumn of 1925 and published early the following year in The New Criterion. There is, says Woolf at the outset, no really developed literature about illness – De Quincey and Proust are among the few writers to fully exploit its possibilities for narrative, description and metaphoric scope, not to mention the emotional perplex into which sickness thrusts us:

People write always about the doings of the mind; the thoughts that come to it; its noble plans; how it has civilized 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. Nor is the reason far to seek. To look these things squarely in the face would need the courage of a lion tamer; a robust philosophy; a reason rooted in the bowels of the earth.

There ought to be novels devoted to influenza, epic poems about typhoid, odes to pneumonia and lyrics to toothache. But if there is no literature of illness (the essay itself is of course an effort to produce one), there is certainly a mode of reading that derives from being unwell. Long prose works, Woolf argues, are unsuited for the sickbed, and it is to poets that the invalid naturally turns. This leads her to consider what it feels like to read Shakespeare while laid up with flu: for the first time, she says, we find ourselves attuned to the strangeness of Shakespeare, feeling ourselves the madness of Hamlet and appreciating the figural variety and weirdness of his language. And then Woolf turns, as if exhausted, as if throwing down her collected Shakespeare and taking up less taxing matter: ‘But enough of Shakespeare – let us turn to Augustus Hare.’ Hare was a mediocre biographer of the nineteenth century; his 1893 book The Story of Two Noble Lives (on Countess Canning and the Marchioness of Waterford) is the sort of thing one might have read in bed with flu in 1925. Woolf’s essay ends in a kind of fever dream, having swerved weakly away from its more alert and argumentative passages into the genuine state of mind of the sick person, the sick writer. ‘On Being Ill’ concludes with a vision of Lady Waterford and her overactive husband, leaving the reader wondering how precisely Woolf has got us here:

Off he would ride again, stately as a crusader, to hunt the fox, and she would wave to him and think, each time, what if this should be the last? And so it was one morning. His horse stumbled. He was killed. She knew it before they told her, and never could Sir John Leslie forget, when he ran downstairs the day they buried him, the beauty of the great lady standing by the window to see the hearse depart, nor, when he came back again, how the curtain, heavy, Mid-Victorian, plush perhaps, was all crushed together where she had grasped it in her agony.