There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.
Interpretation
The experience of illness is shaped by individual perspectives and cultural contexts.
Siri Hustvedt's quote highlights that the way we perceive and experience sickness is not purely a biological phenomenon, but rather a complex interplay of one's temperament, personal past, and the cultural environment that shapes our understanding of health. This suggests that illness is subjective and influenced by various external factors, emphasizing the importance of considering these influences in both medical practice and personal experiences of health and sickness.
In practice
In a health seminar discussing mental well-being, you could use this quote to illustrate how different backgrounds affect health perceptions.
Perception plays a vital role in the diagnosis of bipolar illness. Symptoms are perceived through the categories of psychiatric medicine at a given moment in history, categories which are continually shifting and being named or renamed.
Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.
All human states are organic brain states - happiness, sadness, fear, lust, dreaming, doing math problems and writing novels - and our brains are not static.
I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.
under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed
People who grow up with two or more languages understand that each can express certain aspects of reality better than the other.
You made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you. In this creative restlessness beats and pulsates what is most deeply human - the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, nostalgia for the beautiful, and the voice of conscience.
and even a tea party means apprehension, breakage
I've stopped war reporting. I realized that I'd answered all of my questions about war and about myself.
Yes, there is a conspiracy, in fact there are a great number of conspiracies that are all tripping each other up. And all of those conspiracies are run by paranoid fantasists and ham-fisted clowns. If you are on a list targeted by the CIA, you really have nothing to worry about. If however, you have a name similar to somebody on a list targeted by the CIA, then you are dead.
The universe has a body and soul and evolves through cosmic time. As microcosms of stardust, we do the same.
If justice perishes, human life on Earth has lost its meaning.
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