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December 06, 2004
While I'm feeling all citational,
While I'm feeling all citational, after posting this entry, I've come across the two following quotations that seem to be somehow along the same lines. The first is from G.K. Chesterton's Heretics (thanks, Leah, for the inspiration to start reading Chesterton again), in which he suggests that
"The mistake of all that medical talk lies in the very fact that it connects the idea of health with the idea of care. What has health to do with care? Health has to do with carelessness. In special and abnormal cases it is necessary to have care. When we are peculiarly unhealthy it may be necessary to be careful in order to be healthy. But even then we are only trying to be healthy in order to be careless."The other is from John Donne's "An Anatomy of the World":
There is no health; physicians say that we
At best enjoy but a neutrality.
And can there be worse sickness than to know
That we are never well, nor can be so?
That much I've got down. The rest of the poem I'm still working on. Donne can be like a crossword puzzle, only better in just about every way: I struggle to figure out one metaphor in hopes that it will intersect and give me a clue to another, in hopes in turn that eventually I'll be able to grasp the metaphor underlying the poem as a whole.
Posted by Miki at December 6, 2004 06:39 PM