On a Wonderful, Beautiful, Almost Failed Sentence By Virginia Woolf

She took the opportunity to rein in what must have seemed syntactic and figural excesses in the work. In a passage about the invalid’s attitude to poetry, the 1930 version state

On the one hand: “Illness makes us disinclined for the long campaigns that prose exacts

The excess clauses are sometimes replanted or grafted nearby, not disposed of entirely.

Seven times—four hows and three whats —the sentence invites us to anticipate a logically and artistically satisfying terminus

Each time, I’ve marveled at the logic and ease and length (181 words) of the sentence, the hard clausal steps that slowly mount (or is it descend?) to a grammatically wrong-footing conclusion—the dash’s flat fall where we might have expected a “then…” or “so…” I have wondered about the oddity of Woolf’s metaphors—the sentence is mostly made of meta

The sentence has allured us a long way, but I’m not certain I follow, not even sure what “this” consists of, never mind the “infinitely more.”

we embark on a mysterious paratactic excursion, with no punctuation and no hint, for what seems an age, that our destination is the dentist’s chair: “we go down… and feel … and wake … and come to the surface … and confuse…” Everything tends toward the sentence’s second and final dash—the first dash, the dentist’s, may as well be any instrument at a

So what would a prose literature devoted to illness sound like? Perhaps it could only exist in the form of the essay, of which genre Woolf’s opening sentence is both an elegant part-for-whole and a less than obvious parody.

On the other hand, illness makes us adventurers, in language and imagination; we are pleased to abandon concision and coherence. Above all, so it seems as “On Being Ill” starts to mimic the shape of its own beginning, illness frees us to fall back on the pillows and give up pretending to the logical progression of our thoughts.