Love sickness

“ The shadows darken and passion stirs up my sickness amain And
longing rouses within me the old desireful pain.
The anguish of parting hath taken its sojourn in my breast And
love and longing and sorrow have maddened heart and brain.
Passion hath made me restless and yearning consumes my soul And
tears discover my secret, that else concealed had lain.
I know of no way to ease me of sickness and care and woe; Nor
can my weak endeavour reknit Love's severed skein.
My heart is a raging furnace, because of the heat whereof My
entrails are racked with anguish, that nothing can assain. ”

“ Bad, Dismal, and Blue Feelings.—Despondency breathes disease, and those who yield to it can neither work, eat nor sleep; they only suffer. The spell-bound, fascinated, magnetized affections seem to deaden self-control and no doubt many suffering from love-sickness are totally helpless; they are beside themselves, irritational and wild. Men and women of genius, influence and education, all seem to suffer alike, but they do not yield alike to the subduing influence ”

“ By sickness, or by worse than sickness—sorrow!
And this is Love! Oh! why should woman love;
Wasting her dearest feelings, till health, hope,
Happiness, are but things of which henceforth
She'll only know the name? Her heart is seared:
A sweet light has been thrown upon its life,
To make its darkness the more terrible. ”

“ Because it is simply an excited, and therefore in his eyes diseased, self-consciousness, a wavering struggle between pleasure and pain. "Could man," he says, "but begin to love sickness and suffering, he would perhaps in their arms experience the most delicious rapture, and feel the thrill of the highest positive pleasure.... Does not all that is best begin as illness? ”

“ What he wrote to a friend suffering from illness he applied to himself; he made spiritual profit, as best he might, from separation from the men and the vocation he loved so well:
"I can sympathize with you more completely in your sickness being myself not well. To be shut off from the world, and cut off from human activity—and this is what it means to be sick—gives the soul the best conditions to love God alone, and this is Paradise upon earth. Blessed sickness! which detaches the soul from all creatures and unites it to its sovereign Good. ”

“ I know of no misfortune so little susceptible of consolation as sickness: it is indeed easy to offer comfort, when we ourselves are well; then we can be full of grave saws upon the duty of resignation, etc.; but alas! when the sore visitations of pain come home, all our philosophy vanishes, and nothing remains to be seen. I speak of myself, but a mere sensitive animal, with little wisdom and no patience. Yet if anything can throw a melancholy smile over the pale, wan face of illness, it must be the sight and attentions of those we love. ”

“ He wanted to believe in physical sickness, which often had cures. It wasn't a major divergence: sickness meant being overtaken by a virus that was alien and so with love it could be as unwanted as this. One could be inundated with pleasure- neurotransmitters like anyone whose consciousness succumbs to a knockout gas. This was his subconscious association; and yet consciously he wanted to believe that she was literally ill and despised her for not being so.
"Take my hand. Let's go upstairs."
"I'll die if I go up there."
"No! Mom, Dad, and I will help you to become well...if you're sick." ”

“ We consider sickness in others as a visitation, and as a gift of God; but, as soon as Almighty God grants us this gift, we become uneasy, melancholy, impatient, and anxious. It is not that sickness is the cause of this. But we show in sickness what we really are, because we have then no longer the motives or the means which health afforded us for disguising our self-love. ”

“ He cares for no one else in time of sickness, she alone must prepare his food, administer his medicine, perform his ablutions, and spread his mat for him. He flies to her in the hour of his distress, for he well knows if all the rest of the world turn against him she will be steadfast in her love, whether he be right or wrong. ”

“ But when the scourge of deadly sickness has passed over the land, the effect has almost always been to slacken this tie; the inherent love of life, natural to human beings, turning to an almost incredible selfishness, and inducing men to abandon their nearest and dearest in the hour of peril, leaving them, if stricken, to die alone, or turning them, sick to death though they might be, away from their doors, to perish untended and without shelter. ”

“ Samuel Daniel
1562–1619
121
Love is a Sickness
Love is a sickness full of woes,
All remedies refusing,
A plant that with most cutting grows,
Most barren with best using.
Why so?
More we enjoy it, more it dies ”

“ ON BEING ILL
By VIRGINIA WOOLF 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. ”

“ "When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are," replied the girl steadily, "give away your hearts, love will carry you all lengths—even such as you who have home, friends, other admirers, every thing to fill them. When such as me, who have no certain roof but the coffin-lid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place that parents, home, and friends filled once, or that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to cure us? ”

“ "Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow-men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; ”

“ I suppose it is that sickness and weakness are selfish things and turn our inner eyes and sympathy on ourselves, whilst health and strength give Love rein, and in thought and feeling he can wander where he wills. ”

“ Sometimes I say to myself, "What MADNESS to love any human being so intensely! What would become of you if he were snatched from you?" and then I think that though God justly denies us comfort and support for the future, and bids us lean upon Him now and trust Him for the rest, He can give us strength for the endurance of His most terrible chastisements when their hour comes.
Saturday.—I am a mere baby when I think of your getting sick in this time of almost universal sickness and sorrow and death.... Yesterday Mrs. ”

“ Nor indeed is bodily illness an affliction at all to be compared to those visitations of a darkened spirit, which convey the impression that we are not cared for by those we love, that we are not essential to their happiness, and that life to them would be as full of interest and enjoyment, if we were sleeping in the grave. ”

“ I hope my return to health will not cost me dear. I begin to fear losing the sympathy and affection of those I have learned to love so dearly, and who have cherished me in their hearts simply because of my infirmities. ”

“ And so he comes to know the heart of the man who hath sickness, and calls upon someone, even though it be a weak woman, to cure his sickness; who is bowed low as beside a grave, and would stand upright. ”

“ Of late I have been sick, not of body so much as mind, and mayhap once or twice have suffered harsh thoughts of thee, but to-day these are gone and out of mind, and love for thee burns within me true and steadfast as it shall do until I cease to be—aye, and beyond. ”

“ Life, whether of the body or the heart, consists in certain balanced movements. Any excess introduced into the working of this routine gives rise either to pain or to pleasure, both of which are a mere fever of the soul, bound to be fugitive because nature is not so framed as to support it long. But to make of life one long excess is surely to choose sickness for one's portion. You are sick because you maintain at the temperature of passion a feeling which marriage ought to convert into a steadying, purifying influence. ”

“ Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of pain no greater in compass than one’s little finger-nail,—soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we are! Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of all insupportables, the people whom sickness makes saints are the most contemptible. I know men and ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy, likable,—but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at once their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are uplift with the watery mysticism of those about to be canonized. ”

“ If I may judge from my own experience, there are few epochs in our life more favourable to the growth of sentiments of affection and piety, or more full of pleasurable content, than is the period of gradual recovery from serious illness. The chastening effect of our recent sickness has not yet passed away, and we are at once grateful to our Creator for preserving us, and to our friends for the countless acts of watchful kindness which it is the peculiar property of illness to evoke. ”

“ Sick of a fever; a great fever, says S. Luke. Tropologically, the fever of the soul is the fire of concupiscence, the burning heat of lust, of gluttony, of pride, of envy, &c. Listen to S. Ambrose (lib. 4 in Luc. c. 4, ver. 38) . “Under the type of Simon’s wife’s mother, our flesh languishes under the fevers of various spiritual sicknesses, and is tempest-tossed by the varied enticements of immoderate desires. The fever of love, I may say, is no less than of heat. The one inflames the mind, the other the body. Our avarice is a fever, our lust is a fever. ”

“ The scar which disfigured me in other eyes had been, as I thought, no detriment in his. He loved me, and saw nothing in me but what was consistent with that love. And now I heard him with my own ears speak contemptuously of that scar. All that I had hoped, all that I had confided in, was gone from me in an instant, and I felt myself toppling into a misery I could neither contemplate nor fathom. For an hour I walked the paths of that small wood, communing with myself; then I took my resolve. Life, which had brought me nothing but pain and humiliation, was not worth living. ”

“ In very truth, and without the least exaggeration or affectation or sentiment, I declare that, on the whole, my illness was a source of more pleasure than pain to me, and that I would willingly go through all the fever and weakness to have the delight of the feelings of warm affection, and the consequent unspeakable sensations of gratitude. ”

“ Having been out of health for the last year, and the fever from which I formerly suffered every third week having changed and become continuous, the physicians apprehend that it may become more dangerous. I am resigned to the will of God, and I shall not regret life if I am assured of your favour before my death; and if you love me as much as I love you, and shall always love you. ”

“ Whether as flames in the air, or twining leaves on a tree, or flowers in a field, they have felt the sweetness and fitness of each other’s being in former lives,—and the craving sense of that sweetness and fitness can never be done away with,—never! Not as long as this present universe lasts! It is a terrible thing,” continued the Doctor in a lower tone, “a terrible fatality,—the desire of love. In some cases it is a curse; in others, a divine and priceless blessing. The results depend entirely on the temperaments of the human creatures possessed by its fever. ”

“ The fever burns from morn till eve;
I toss upon my bed;
And none but heavy hands relieve
My aching, heated head.
Harsh voices of hard-hearted men
Attempt to sympathize;
But sympathy is worthless when
Love gives it not its rise. ”

“ She would gladly have taken the disease into her own body to save you. Her love for you would drive her to any lengths. No matter to what depths of vice and misery you have sunk, no matter how profligate you have grown, she has not turned you out of her heart. ”

“ Love perhaps had had nothing to do with her dangerous illness, but it had much to do with her recovery, and those not in the secret wondered to see how she improved, her cheeks growing round and full and her eyes shining with returning health and happiness. ”

“ Thy sickness, they say, and thy puny habit, require that thou do this or avoid that, but know that thy life is a flitting state, a tent for a night, and do thou, sick or well, finish that stint. Thou art sick, but shall not be worse, and the universe, which holds thee dear, shall be the better. ”