SOURCE: "On Being Ill," in Collected Essays, Vol. 4, The Hogarth Press, 1967, pp. 193-203.

In the following essay, Woolf reflects on the ways in which being ill altered her perspective on life as well as her approach to reading works of literature.

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 wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when...