On Illness

On Illness

A particular kind of mental illness developed in the land, and the illness was characterized thusly: First those who were ill sought out natural science for help, and when the doctors couldn't find anything wrong, they gave their patients pyschopharmica anyway, but it didn't help and the patients stopped coming. Then the ill sought out therapy groups where they attempted to describe how they felt – and they felt a lot – but in the therapy groups it was impossible to see there was anything wrong, so the ill sought out alternative treatment and tried acupuncture, zone therapy, palm reading, tarot cards and finally magic crystals - in that order - but the ill didn't begin feeling well. So they looked Jesus up, attended church frequently, prayed to God and read books about Christ, but they couldn't maintain the faith – if they'd ever gotten it – and the ill felt they hadn't been helped. Then they sought out healthy foods and began drinking special tea and lots of water and eating plenty of vegetables, but when this didn't help, the ill quit and began taking long walks in the pristine nature. They looked at green mountains and blue water and at the same time gave a lot of thought to their desperate situation, but it didn't help for long, and once again the ill stopped trying the cure. Instead they began running marathons that took them precisely three hours to complete, which wasn't quite fast enough to be worth the suffering, nor did the running make them well. So the ill – who had plenty of money and every opportunity to pursue whatever they liked – took long trips to China and India, where they sought out gurus and healers and began reading books on philosophy and the mysteries of the East, and they meditated, but they didn't feel cured and went home disappointed, where, in the end, they began praying to Odin and Thor. People thought this very old fashioned and the ill didn't find that it helped, either.

    While their contemporaries found it to be a problem that the ill were so demanding and didn't have to work - though fortunately they contributed to the growth of a variety of health industries - the ill possessed a particular quality that wasn't appreciated until future generations. This particular quality was perseverance, even though no one could find any scientific evidence that the ill had ever been ill. Many scientific studies had been performed on them and future generations dissected their brains, but no one could establish a cause, because the ill had all led pretty happy lives before illness struck.

    The ill didn't know what was wrong, either. They'd gotten the idea in their heads that they were ill, and after the prescribed period – which stretched over precisely ten years – they lay down to die, stating with relief that they'd "tried everything". Some felt it had been the long treatment period and the exactly identical series of exploited possibilities, which characterized the course of their illness, that finally did the ill in; others thought this unwavering course in itself was their illness. For a time, this acknowledgement made people shun the different methods that had been tried in the course of the ills' illness since they were afraid these methods would make them ill, too, or they would be accused of being ill, and they began seeking a sense of security in reverse order – beginning in other words, with Odin and Thor. And in this way the illness was wiped out; people began starting in reverse order and were cured when they finally reached "the scientific phase", which one preferably shouldn't leave if one wished to be healthy.

    But this was a long time ago and since then no one has seen people with such perseverance. People like these are scarce. Besides, we are much wiser today, where the illness has returned. Curing this illness lies not in slavishly trying all the possibilities, although this is actually the progression of the illness itself, and is characterized by the ill person simply not wanting to be well, or by his craving attention, or his suffering from want of love and being looked after (some say it is an unhealthy need to seek the meaning of life – by looking for it in illness); naturally the cure lies in a combination of all these possibilities at once, and is also the most effective. This is why modern man is so busy.