The reason for this absence, Woolf believes, is that when it comes to experiencing and expressing illness we are limited by “the poverty of language.”ĭear Virginia, what else have you been keeping from me? 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… 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 and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. “Considering how common illness is,” she begins, In this essay, Woolf questions the absence of illness among the major themes of great literature. That familiar feeling of I-should-but-I-don’t shame gave way to near-instant fondness when recently I came across Woolf’s essay “ On Being Ill.” That I favor one genre over another by the same author is not revelation, but in this case, I was caught off guard by the swiftness of my conversion. I take comfort in knowing that creation is an ongoing, human process. I like my art best when it shows the seams, when I see the nicks and imperfections. This is not criticism, merely preference. Truth, it seemed, was presented not discovered along the way. Reading her fiction I was left, for good reason, with the impression that I was admiring a polished, clean work of art exact and flawless. It used to be that I would feel a measure of shame when her name surfaced in books or conversation as if she was someone-a quick witted, independent, literary woman who, like me, happened to live in pain-whose work I should to but never actually did favor. I am not proud to admit this, but I recall picking up Mrs. This realization surprised me because to this point, it is fair to say, reading her fiction has felt more like an endurance test than an enjoyable pastime. Lately, I have discovered a kindred in Virginia Woolf. Even my own medical records, that unruly stack of doctor’s notes and prescriptions and x-rays and referrals towering in the corner, has a role to play in this research.īut back to Virginia and the five sturdy, hardbound volumes of her diary now in my possession. I read Sontag and Didion and Dillard, grateful to find myself amongst women who effectively communicate hurt. I labor my way through dense medical texts. My days are spent taking apart the language we use to communicate suffering, then slowly, hopefully with tact and generosity, putting it back together again. Besides, if I was going to immerse myself in her diary I may as well be caught in the full swirl of her brilliance. To learn more, see the privacy policy.I wasn’t planning on buying all five volumes of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, but the cost of purchasing the entire set was, oddly, similar to the cost of purchasing just the one volume I needed to reference. Please note that Urban Thesaurus uses third party scripts (such as Google Analytics and advertisements) which use cookies. Special thanks to the contributors of the open-source code that was used in this project: and you might like to check out the growing collection of curated slang words for different topics over at Slangpedia. There is still lots of work to be done to get this slang thesaurus to give consistently good results, but I think it's at the stage where it could be useful to people, which is why I released it. Please also note that due to the nature of the internet (and especially UD), there will often be many terrible and offensive terms in the results. Or you might try boyfriend or girlfriend to get words that can mean either one of these (e.g. The search algorithm handles phrases and strings of words quite well, so for example if you want words that are related to lol and rofl you can type in lol rofl and it should give you a pile of related slang terms. The higher the terms are in the list, the more likely that they're relevant to the word or phrase that you searched for. Note that this thesaurus is not in any way affiliated with Urban Dictionary.ĭue to the way the algorithm works, the thesaurus gives you mostly related slang words, rather than exact synonyms. The official Urban Dictionary API is used to show the hover-definitions. These indexes are then used to find usage correlations between slang terms. The Urban Thesaurus was created by indexing millions of different slang terms which are defined on sites like Urban Dictionary.
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