Even when one usually heartily loathes him, the experience of being ill is so unhappily familiar to us all that we feel a fleeting sense of what he must be going through.

"Poor bastard!" we think (albeit perhaps subconsciously), remembering our own experiences of bedridden wretchedness.

During this pandemic Virginia Woolf's funny, eccentric and deeply truthful essay, On Being Ill (first published in 1930 but with timeless qualities that have kept it forever in print) has been much dusted off and referred to by the well-read commentariat.

And no wonder. Quite apart from being so splendid a read, it addresses something, the commonplace experience of being ill, so seldom examined. Writers' strange ignoring of illness is the piece's very theme.

Woolf (1882-1941), a luminously brilliant novelist and essayist, was herself tragically acquainted with illness, especially mental illness.

"Considering how common illness is," she begins On Being Ill, "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, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals ... it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."

Woolf says that writers imagine, wrongly, that body and mind/soul are separate and that only the soul (whose existence she doubts) is important. She says writers depict characters kicking their bodies around (in travels, adventures, battles, etc.) as if the body is just some "old leather football".

"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 ... on the contrary, the very opposite is true. All day, all night the body intervenes; blunts or sharpens, colours or discolours..."

She is especially sensitive to the sheer loneliness experienced by the ill. To be home alone flat on your bed with your influenza (she uses the example of influenza a lot) while the well, the great majority, carry on with true Life, is to "cease to be a soldier in the army of the upright".

"We [the sick] become deserters. They [the well] march to battle. We float with the sticks on the stream; helter-skelter with the dead leaves on the lawn ..."

"[We say] 'I am in bed with influenza' - but what does that convey of the great experience; how the world has changed its shape ... how the whole landscape of life lies remote like the shore seen from a ship far out at sea?"

Woolf says that some of that uniquely painful loneliness of the ill lies in their being unable to communicate their plight to the well.

"English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of King Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare and Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry."

Woolf's unusual sensitivity to our plight when we are ill is very touching. We can't talk to anyone else about it but we see, from the sensitivity she radiates in On Being Ill, we really can talk to her. She seems a kind of literary and intellectual Florence Nightingale, dear Sister Woolf, there beside us with her perfect, empathetic bedside manner.

Commenting today, in her empathy she would see in Trump's much-condemned getting out of his hospital bed and taking a drive-by, the wholly understandable behaviour of someone (and in this instance someone unusually hungry for the adulation of others) made unbearably lonely by his illness.

Forgiving him his drive-by and the bizarre things he is gibbering since his discharge, she would say that here we see his mind unbalanced and enslaved by his body's illness. This enslavement happens to all of us when we are ill, Woolf says, so let's be kind and understanding. Let's try to put ourselves in the bedridden president's pyjamas.