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The fact that I'm working for a no win, no fee compensation firm at the moment may mean that I read a lot of practical, useful material - but that doesn't keep me from the passionate kind of reading that 'proper' literature involves. So it was with pleasure that I found myself reading a piece in the Huffington Post that managed to unite these forms of reading.
The journalist wrote about how she found herself compelled to recite 'The World is Too Much With Us', by Wordsworth, as a result of suffering a mild form of whiplash injury. Her moment of communion with nature was spoilt by coming into collision with industrial modernity, in what appears to have been a minor car accident.
She was very careful not to admit any kind of responsibility in the car accident, or even state clearly that it had happened; no doubt this was an attempt to keep any following compensation claim well in the hands of personal injury lawyers. The poem warns that "We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!", and I guess that the chance of giving our rights to compensation away may have been guiding her pen.
The phrase 'whiplash' never appears in the Wordsworth, but you can find it in Emily Dickinson; 'A Narrow Fellow in the Grass', her poem that looks closely at a snake in a meadow, where she describes seeing "a Whiplash / Unbraiding in the Sun", and recognising it for the snake it is. The poem ends with a recognition of "a tighter breathing / and Zero at the Bone". It's probably a coincidence that a whiplash injury can result in breathing disorders in some cases - car crashes not being a serious risk in nineteenth-century Amherst - but again, it's a joy to find such a coincidence.
The Huffington journalist clearly managed to soothe herself by recalling the Wordsworth, and there's evidence to suggest that having snippets of literature in the head can be beneficial in various unpleasant circumstances. Terry Waite, to take an extreme one, was able to ease his captivity in the 1980s with remembered passages from literature; to come back to domestic car accidents and their aftermath, remembered passages may also ease the recovery of a whiplash sufferer whose neck injury makes it painful to hold a reading position.
This, of course, presumes that a sufferer enjoys reading the same way I do; perhaps other people would prefer to recall the line-up of classic football teams, imagining what might have happened if the English 1966 World Cup team could have played this year's Chelsea squad, say. Or mentally re-enacting the recipe for the first meal they cooked for a lover.
On the other hand, it shouldn't need a car crash to bring us back in touch with the internal landscape we love - whether that's food, sport, literature or whatever. Wordsworth warns that our daily lives can force us into a state where "for everything, we are out of tune" - so it's worth taking some time out from your job (be it in no win no fee compensation claims for me, or whatever your industry is for you) to reconnect with whatever you care about. And remember it, just in case.
