In that light, I contemplated this famously long sentence by Virginia Woolf, which begins her essay "On Being Ill."
"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 light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confuse his 'Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth' with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this and infinitely more, 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."
Thinking of waking and finding oneself in a chair and expecting to hear the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome you, I encountered these 2 elegant sketches:
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Those two video sketches elicited smiles. I was feeling grumpy because I woke up too early, couldn't get back to sleep and, somewhat begrudgingly, got up and started my day. It was nice to know I could find something entertaining.
Just noticing Death's pronoun sign
That's not unreadable, nor reader resistant.
Illness is a part of life one might say its a manifestation of our fallen worlf
There was a woman, maybe mid 50's, who worked at the customer service counter of a supermarket where I would sometimes shop. Back when shopliftérs were not ignored, I saw her intervene in such a case, but with compassion.
Eventually that chain opened a location close to my workplace. She was at that new location, in the bakery section. Over the years, there was a visible change in her health - she lost too much weight, her skin tone changed. I overheard her tell a co-worker, "For the first time in my life, I'm thinking clearly". And then she was no longer there.
…yah death it/that- hehe. I like that death is left handed, too..
...did Virginia mention the name of her dentist? I went to one that had the laughing gas but that sounds marvelous…
Leftists won’t like the billionaire sketch because he was depicted as pampered and indulgent neurotic, not properly shamed as a malefactor of wealth.
…show of hands- who didn’t see the sketch writers sending the billionaire to hell? What I thought…
…oops, I see Wince got it…
…oops, I see Wince got it…
Definite William Hurt vibe with Death. And since WH passed away a couple of years back the casting choice is solid.
I need to drink more water I see.
Doestoevsky's novels are filled with characters in the throes of fever, delirium, and illness.
Whatever that guy's name is he's good. I liked him in Veep. Never took the trouble to learn his name though. He's a sort of blue collar worker who does a solid job and doesn't call attention to himself while doing it.
*refills water jug while drinking coffee.
I've been accused of having a dry wit. (worries)
Tolstoy's Gerasim, to Ivan Ilyich, "We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?"
That was Matt Walsh from Veep in those videos, wasn't it? Great videos. It would be nice to chat with Matt Walsh on the way through.
Virginia Woolf certainly could have used a few periods in that paragraph, but then, it wouldn't have been Virginia Woolf, would it?
…I’m fairly certain correcting the grammar and punctuation of creative writing gets death scribbling in his notes. Correcting that stuff in tweets gets you the door with the hot doorknob…
I've got mixed feelings about this whole existence and life on earth thing. On the one hand, when you consider the vastness of space and time, we are all of us, even the poorest among us, extremely fortunate to experience conscious life. It's an extremely improbable event, Trillions and trillions of stars and billions of years and then just us in the cosmos.. We really hit the lottery, and even among the lottery winners, we're lucky. We won the Powerball jackpot, not the Take 5. We didn't live in such a bad era. Those Plague years must have been tough. On the minus side, however, we are all of us, even the richest among us, destined to have an existence marked by a lot of pain and emptiness ending in ultimate futility.
"I haven't had a period in five paragraphs" - Virginia Woolf
Rimshot for Mezzrow.
Virginia Woolf went four years without a period.
Because Virginia Wolf wrote it, it must be diagrammable.
Death intermediated by HR.
I’ve been near death for the past year. Weird, unaccounted for cardiac event that nearly took me out. Bladder cancer. Cancer now in remission. Being near death really does get your attention. I’m going to a funeral Mass for one of my Catholic choristers next week. At my age (76), the deaths among my social circle are quite frequent.
If you click through on the name — neardeath — you'll see: "Matt Walsh is Death. He reviews your near-death experience and decides whether to send you on... or send you back. New episodes every Tuesday."
All the videos are on that page.
I was treated as if I were near death when I went to the emergency room with the story of my inability to read about Andrew Jackson's parrot. If it weren't for AI, I'd have just figured I was tired and gone to sleep. Instead I spent the night "getting my head examines" — that is MRI, CT scan, etc. I've had a heart monitor stickered to my chest for the last 2 weeks and look forward to ripping it off at 10 a.m.
Ann’s ‘Dead, Parrot Sketch’- now that needs parsing..
Common sense is lost when you have faith AI has the answers.
Think for yourself
And stop complaining, boomers.
Take responsibility for yourselves and your actions.
A secularized era cuts out ultimate questions from the "business" of life. But still we die. Whether we get an answer we believe or a plasma TV, in the end we come to an end. We're gone from here. We won't get an answer that changes that. So it's all about how you live while you are here. Our experience with life in a secularized era is now telling us that that a human life, having defined itself as meaningless, feels intolerably meaningless. Yet you can't change what you really think just because it hurts to say you're nothing in a big nothing. But you can say "what if?" What if I was wrong? What if I "had the experience but missed the meaning"? What if I have a conscience because it matters to the Creator of the universe whether I do the right thing? Chemistry doesn't care but does chemistry's Creator? If I were powerful I'd say to hell with everyone but do I have a Creator who doesn't think that way? This city is going to pass away just like me. Why do I think its blind indifference is a guide? What will not pass away? Why not ask about that? Why not ask? If nothing matters, why not ask if nothing's really true? Says who?
I think those stick-on heart monitors are doctor’s “I voted” stickers. Hope you are soon better than Virginia Wolfe.
Yeah, I've had a zio patch stuck on once a year, for a while now. Makes showering a little tricky. Report from the last one was the my heart was grumpy and prone to fits. Interestingly it turns out they can be a bit tricky and Opus 5 and Chat 5.6 had a different take (more favorable) on the results than the zio algorithm did. The cardiologists did NOT want to hear about that. Anyway, best of luck.
Turns out the paleo diet...all the red meat and eggs and protein isn't as healthy i. The long run as promised...
Try fruits and veggies, ann. Fiber, vitamins and yes, water is in there. You sneered at veggies, but you dont seem to be the healthiest people. Nttawwt.
Take care. Let meade eat what he likes, but be smarter about what YOUR body needs before you changed your diet for him. He always looks grey around the gills, poor color for all the alleged outdoor activity and fresh air. Was he exposed to a lot of chemicals in the landscaping days?
Or maybe he's not outside all that much and just posts Pic and kids everything he is? Make healthy living a priority... not just for show or to blog.
Spectator sports and light moving around in the house listening to podcasts likely isn't all that healthy but a sedentary life? Remember, girls can exercise and be athletic too...
Never too late to learn to swim...
Pickleball? Lots of ppl your age play...
Virginia Wolf. Be afraid, very afraid. Imagine if she were alive today and had a podcast. Yikes.
Don’t regret going to the hospital and getting everything checked out, that is the privilege of being American. You could have had a minor stroke that they would have clot busted and saved your brain. In Canada they would have put you on the list for a scan next year.
When it’s your brain, don’t feel guilty because you are privileged, just get it checked.
The purpose of life is to be lived, like the purpose of a car is to drive down the road, there is nothing more to it.
I think that first sketch is a dig at Ray Kurzweil and his supplement only diet, which incidentally hasn't killed him yet.
--- I was treated as if I were near death when I went to the emergency room with the story of my inability to read about Andrew Jackson's parrot. [AA]
That isn't the first and only time that you have seemed to me to miss the intonation of the voice behind something you quoted. Not frequent, by any means, but not unprecedented, either.
What caused your anosmia? Maybe there is a strange relationship. Or maybe it was just a day of brain fog. It happens.
If the doctor says to you, Stop reading propaganda and intentionally deceptive newspapers, Ms. A., they are eroding your sense of language and its reality...... well.....
I had a close call two actualy in the spring and fall of 2004
I checked out ... from that Wolff sentence after about the fourth comma.
Idiosyncratically, I find that kind of writing rude, expecting the reader to wade through endless unnecessary clauses and thoughts.
It's as if she's thinking, yeah punk, you're gonna read this because I'm Virginia Fucking Wolff.
You may ask: Are you afraid of her? Yup, afraid of a waste of any of my time here on earth.
Is she related to Ernest Borgnine?
Virginia Woolf was in love with the sound of her own voice and her mastery of style. She also had some "strange medical conditions." The mood changes that illness brought on in her may have been unique to her.
Grasshopper, cling tightly to sentence diagramming. It will be your thread through the labyrinth.
My dog, who some may recall (though why you would, who can say?) was diagnosed with lymphoma almost seven months ago, is starting to wheeze and occasionally cough. Yesterday she ate nothing. This morning, nothing. Now, she did get into some very questionable water a couple of days ago and drank a bunch of it, and yesterday the vet gave us antibiotics for that. But my AI queries this morning were all about whether she's suffering enough for us to... you know.
This is only four days after sitting at the deathbed of the dear Althouse non-commenter who passed away Friday night. I'm kind of laughing at the near death sketches, and kind of not.
When I was in my 20's I woke up in an intensive care unit after experiencing my first logging accident, my first helicopter ride and my first dose of morphine, and discovered a bunch of those EKG patches were stuck to me which I was told were connected to a heart monitor at the nurses station down the hall so somebody could rush in if there was a problem, but that it was just a precaution and don't worry, which I didn't because I'm not prone to it, but I am prone to boredom and later, when I noticed that the monitor leads snapped onto the patches with what were basically shirt snaps, I wanted to see if anybody would really rush in if there was a problem so I unsnapped a couple and nothing happened which I decided was a good sign or they would have been paying closer attention and I guess it was, because I got out of there after only a few days and was feeling pretty good all things considered 2 weeks later when I heard that same helicopter fell 7 stories into the street next to the hospital after lifting off from the roof because somebody forgot to remove something that had a 'Remove Before Flight' flag on it, but nobody was killed, amazingly enough, though I imagine they had to wear those patches as a precaution and maybe even got a dose of morphine which is amazing stuff and was probably a big help to the poor guy or gal who found out they were going to have to wait now and then ride in a regular ambulance instead of a helicopter, but at least it didn't crash on the way back with them in it is probably the way to look at it.
Bob Boyd taking on the Virginia Woolf long sentence challenge.
Signals of unknown, undetermined origin and fidelity are an article of faith or evidence of secular insanity.
@Bob Boyd at 9:45
That was infinitely more readable than the selection from Ms. Wolff. Not to mention infinitely more interesting.
To answer Virginia’s question, why would pay money to hear somebody talk about their illness when everyone you know will do it for free?
I never understood the point of sentence diagramming. I felt like it was something that I should know, so I learned how to do it. I still don’t get the point.
Thanks, Wilbur. You never know where the day may take you.
I love Albert Brooks, "Defending Your Life." How can he possibly compete with Meryl Steep, who ran into a burning house to rescue a child, or something? But he loves her: is he going to have to keep repeating a somewhat hellish life on earth, while she is in paradise? How can they ever be together?
I also thought that it was funny that both of the people who got sent to the afterlife had been ingesting questionable things. And the billionaire was doomed from the start because he had actually been trying to cheat death.
Who’s afraid of Kamala Woolf?
“I’ll speak for myself when I say that none of us just live in a silo and you think you just fell out of a coconut tree because you exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you and there is no success without that level of profound support and reinforcement that comes from standing on their shoulders along the path that on which you stand that was charted long before you, a memory of legacy that gives you some sense of pride in what can be the destiny and was the destiny that so many fought for so that we who are heirs to the greatest democracy can see what can be, unburdened by what has been, and chart a new way forward on the path that led me here as we fight for this country we love.”
LOL.
Reminds me of Professor Irwin Corey.
Churchill once said that nothing in life is more exhilarating than being shot at without effect.
Perhaps recovery from a life-threatening illness shares some of this effect?
Reading and scholastics aren't for everyone..
Don't criticize what you cant understand...
“In that light, I contemplated this famously long sentence by Virginia Woolf, which begins her essay "On Being Ill."”
Read some Faulkner. He wrote sentences that make Woolf’s best look like “See spot run.”
I was recently reading "Mrs. Dalloway" on my Kindle and I believe I encountered a sentence that required 5 page turns to complete and a more than 15 to comprehend.
Sentences is like that must have been what the literary-minded general in Anthony Powell's long novel series was reading that made him explain, "Damn! The woman can write!" But to me it seems more like a sentence that only another writer could love.
“I was treated as if I were near death when I went to the emergency room…”
It means either you are or aren’t but there’s possibly something urgent to be done. I’d take that as a good sign. People headed for the seat at the desk don’t get the doting…
…unless the people doing the doting are the transplant teams…
I see the water can was "Liquid Death."
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