Topic
Disease in this collection is less about illness than about the costs of embodiment — the fact that having a body means being vulnerable to it. Rousseau's feeble-body-weakens-the-mind is the dualist's observation: the connection between physical condition and intellectual capacity is as unwelcome as it is real. Caesar on willingness to die but not to endure pain-with-patience is here as well as under pain because it is specifically about the chronic, everyday diminishment of illness rather than its dramatic finale. Bierce's love-as-a-temporary-insanity-curable-by-marriage treats love as a pathology — the most satirical reframing of the erotic in the collection. Ebner-Eschenbach's rheumatism-and-true-love entry is the gentler one: you don't believe in either until your first attack. Juvenal on old age replete with ills is the least comforting of the classical authors and the most honest about what longevity actually requires. Twain on teething returns to the beginning: Adam and Eve escaped it, which he counts among their greatest advantages. Disease in this collection is ultimately about the price of consciousness.