Character in sickness and health

I lied when I said, "It's not me, not the real me. It's the sickness that's speaking." For sickness has no voice, and it was me, a nasty me. How can I claim that my goodness, my lofty feelings, constitute the "real me," and that my rancor and malice are just "sickness" and not me?

We can readily see in others what we do not care, or dare, to see in ourselves. The patients I work with are chronically ill. They have, they know they have, little or no hope of recovery. Some of them show a transcendent humor and gallantry, an unspoilt love and affirmation of life. But others are bitter, virulent, envenomed—great haters, great spiters, murderous, demonic. It is not the sickness but the person that shows here, his collapse or corruption with the cruelties of life. If we have youth, beauty, blessed gifts, strength, if we find fame, fortune, favor, fulfillment, it is easy to be nice, to turn a warm heart to the world. But let us be disfavored, disfigured, incapicitated, injured; let us fall from health and strength, from fortune and favor; let us find ourselves ill, miserable and without clear hope of recovery—then our mettle, our moral character, will be tried to the limit. 

Oliver Sacks, A Leg to Stand on (1984 with 1993 afterward), p. 148 [Funny: the Kindle edition doesn't indicate the publisher.]

Middle-aged health worries

During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. [He was fifty-eight.] When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about the slowing up, losing weight, limiting the cholesterol intake. It had happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, "Slow down. You're not as young as you once were." And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.

John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America  (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), p. 17 (orig. published 1962)