For the past couple of days I've been enduring a cold whose major symptom is a guerilla sinus headache that leaps out from behind big rocks shouting, "Ah-hah!" and smacks me with a cudgel. As a result, I have been an unproductive worker and a slow thinker, poor at counting the cards in my hand and reading recipes. On the other hand, bad television programs are more soothing than usual, and falling asleep on the couch feels like a stroke of genius.

As Virginia Woolf says in her essay "On Being Ill,"

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 . . . it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature. Novels, one would have thought, would have been devoted to influenza; epic poems to typhoid; odes to pneumonia, lyrics to toothache. But no; . . . literature does its best to maintain that its concern is with the mind; that the body is a sheet of plain glass through which the soul looks straight and clear.

This is an essay that I don't actually own, so I've only read quoted bits and pieces. I wish I owned it, though. Then I could lie on the couch today and read it, before drifting into my next stroke of unconscious genius.

[P.S. My friend Dave Morrison is featured on today's Writer's Almanac. Dave has just released a new book of rock-and-roll poems, and he and I will reading together in April.]