Virginia Woolf begins her essay on illness with a single, unbroken sentence. It is one of her most beautiful sentences: "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 view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and awake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels in the harbors when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's armchair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth, rinse the mouth with a greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of heaven to welcome us –– when we think of this 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." From my interview with Francine Prose