One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of st
In the hospital ward a consultant gastroenterologist appeared.
“How do you feel?” he asked.
“I feel,” I said, “very ill.”
This, apparently, was not the concise yet comprehensive answer that I had imagined it to be. He seemed to require something more. “Can you describe it?” he asked.
I couldn’t. That anguished, pressurised feeling – a sensation somewhere between burning and falling – that extended through my torso, my limbs, my entire body was by now so familiar to me, I was astonished that it didn’t have a name and that I didn’t know it. How could this be? I was, after all, a prize-winning novelist.
Frustrated I fell back on anger. Was the doctor stupid? Didn’t he know what “feeling very ill” meant?
In her essay On Being Ill, Virginia Woolf says, “let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry”.
At least I was in good company.
I remember very well what I wanted to say to the doctor: “I feel like I am about to fall off the world.” I had the sense to realise that he would probably not be able to do much with this. What doctors need is a clear description of something physical, but what the sufferer experiences may be as much emotional as it is physical – it may even have a spiritual component. It is very difficult in my experience to separate the different strands.
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