Making Illness Worthwhile

By Major George Fielding Anti-Climax Special Correspondent

By my reckoning, Michel de Montaigne would have been a grand old man in his late forties when he made the following observation ’round about 1580 in his rambling essay “On Some Verses of Virgil”:

Once I used to mark the burdensome and gloomy days as extraordinary. Those are now my ordinary ones; the extraordinary are the fine serene ones. I am on my way to the point where I will leap for joy as at a novel favour when nothing pains me.

In “On Experience,” the French Renaissance philosopher’s final essay before his death at age 59 in 1592, Montaigne paid homage to painful kidney stones for teaching him forbearance and resignation: “Consider how artfully and gently the stone weans you from life and detaches you from the world.”

Anyone who’s been really ill or in terrible pain knows what he’s talking about. “But is there anything so sweet,” he asks, “as that sudden change, when from extreme pain, by the voiding of my stone, I come to recover as if by lightning the beautiful light of health, so free and so full, as happens in our sudden and sharpest attacks of colic?”

That’s what I want to blab about here: Leaping for joy as at a novel favour when the pain relents. The sweetness of recovering as if by lightning the beautiful light of health. Or as playwright George Bernard Shaw might have put it, and did: “I enjoy convalescence. It is the part that makes illness worthwhile.”

(Of course, Shaw was also a contentious polemicist who famously wrote, in 1903’s Man and Superman: “There are two tragedies in life. One is not to get your heart’s desire. The other is to get it.” So fair warning. Proceed with caution.)

On most medical topics — disorders, tests, diagnoses, drugs and so on — you can learn more from textbooks or mobile apps or Dr. Google or even a Merck Manual than from the entire canon of world literature. I won’t contest this.

But for eloquent descriptions of the exhilaration of convalescence, four out of five doctors recommend Dr. Seuss and his literary Kollegen over Dr. Oz and his smarmy Fox Fartencatchers, nine times out of ten.

This is J.D. Salinger’s character (and alter ego) Buddy Glass freshly rising from nine weeks in bed with acute hepatitis in the 1959 novella Seymour — An Introduction: “O happy hepatitis! I’ve never known sickness — or sorrow, or disaster, for that matter — not to unfold, eventually, like a flower or a good memo. We’re required only to keep looking.”

Voici Joan Didion in her 1968 essay “In Bed,” which is mostly about the wretchedness of the debilitating migraines from which she suffered “three, four, sometimes five times a month … insensible to the world around me.”

At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed toga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. I open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.

Recovery from illness is routinely seen as a return to the ordinary — but in literature, it often expands into something more profound. It is the rebirth, the reawakening to the quiet, unnoticed joys of living that Montaigne and Salinger and Didion are all touching on here. Writers across centuries have chronicled the afterglow of healing, not merely as a physical renewal but as a spiritual deepening — a second sight gained through suffering. Not necessarily overnight, verständlich; sometimes over days or weeks or months.

In her autobiographical essay “On Being Ill,” Virginia Woolf explores the paradox of how illness, via the billowing chintz curtains of temporary isolation, alters our perception of the world: “Directly the bed is called for, the door shuts on gaiety, and one is left with nothing but one’s body.” Woolf’s insight lies not in despair but in the realization that illness grants a kind of solitude in which one sees more clearly. The recovery that follows becomes a gentle unfolding — like sunlight gradually filling a dark room. If we have our wits about us, it enables sufferers to re-enter the world with a new reverence.

Remember that old chestnut about a man hitting himself with a hammer because it felt so good when he stopped? Special offer: Maladies, afflictions and ailments will do the hammering gratis. You needn’t lift a finger. Except maybe the middle one.

Marcel Proust, who spent much of his life ill and confined, captured the emotional clarity that follows illness in In Search of Lost Time. After a period of fragility, narrator Marcel describes how “a day on which we have recovered from a long illness, when we walk out into the open air and the sun shines, is one of the most beautiful days in life.” Here, recovery is not simply a return to health, but a rediscovery of wonder — the way a child first sees the world.

“Convalescence,” concurred American short story writer Margaret Prescott Montague, “is a sort of grown-up rebirth, enabling us to see life with a fresh eye.”

This sense of renewal is echoed in Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë. After enduring both emotional and physical anguish, protagonist Jane experiences a quiet but profound restoration: “I began to experience genuine pleasure again … I had been in the furnace, and emerged tried.” Her healing is internal and dignified, marked not by dramatic transformation but by a steady return of joy, autonomy and, encore une fois, a renewed sense of purpose.

Leo Tolstoy, too, recognizes this subtle exaltation in The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Though the titular character’s recovery is not physical, the spiritual transformation he undergoes at the edge of death resembles the clarity many feel after surviving pain. In the final moments, Ivan Ilyich exclaims, “It is finished!” — not in defeat, but in peace. He understands at last that suffering has stripped away illusion and left him with a more truthful, compassionate view of life.

Even in poetry — especially in poetry — this theme resonates deeply. Emily Dickinson, whose life was marked by seclusion, physical illnesses and psychological distress, often found joy in the quiet aftermath of pain. She writes:

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs – The stiff Heart questions “was it He, that bore,” And “Yesterday, or Centuries before”?

Here, Dickinson captures that surreal stillness following deep suffering, the almost ceremonial reverence we feel when pain releases its grip. Her joy is quiet, not jubilant. It is a sober gratitude.

Just to personalize this a bit: I was pretty sick with cancer four years ago and felt in my bones that I would never feel as good again as I do right now.

Think of one of those tattered, faded board games back at the family cabin held together with scotch tape along the centre fold. Think of a lost Professor Plum game piece from Clue or a forsaken Parcheesi marble that has fallen off the kitchen table and into a crack in the floorboards behind the wood stove. That was me. White-haired (except on top, where it’s a little thin) and flaccid-bottomed. Molto agitato.

I still have scotch tape along the centre fold holding me together, but I could not have been more mistaken about my prospects for survival and recovery. Today, not an hour goes by without my experiencing some sober gratitude — even when not entirely sober. Fresh off a jolly family reunion, I’m more grateful than ever to still be tugging at your sleeve.

If you or someone you love is in similarly dire circumstances right now, I know how hollow this all sounds. Dear God, how I hated to be reminded of it when well-meaning friends would trot out dog-eared adages and moth-eaten platitudes.

But it remains true nevertheless, Smithers, that it ain’t over till the silver Monopoly thimble sings: “Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.” It’s gettin’ there, but it ain’t dark yet. Just don’t book into a Boardwalk hotel if you don’t own the real estate.

To recover is to awaken — to feel the texture of life with keener fingertips. It is to step into morning light and recall, without words, the preciousness of breath, of movement, of being able to laugh without wincing in pain. Literature teaches us that the truest joys are not those of untouched perfection, but those that emerge from hardship — tempered, deepened and made radiant by contrast.

I would just as soon be living in a world where this wasn’t true. Where winter wasn’t coming and darkness never fell. Where the miracle baby didn’t get pulled alive from the rubble three days after the earthquake ... because the earthquake never happened in the first place. To me, that would be a miracle worth celebrating.

But that’s not the place in which we find ourselves. Zut, what would you?

In the words of Kahlil Gibran, whose mystical prose often explored the nature of pain and joy: “The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.” Recovery can be the vessel that cradles this paradox. It is the soft light after the storm, and in its glow, we see life not as we did before, but more clearly, more tenderly.

And know the place for the first time.