- On Being Ill — Virginia Woolf, 1926
Woolf’s short essay on how strange it is that illness, which happens to everyone, has produced so little literature. She is funny and exact about the slowed-down perception of a person in bed, and about the small permission a fever grants to drop the performance of being well.
- Wit — Mike Nichols, 2001
Emma Thompson plays a literature professor undergoing cancer treatment and gradually allowing herself to be a patient rather than a performance. The film is patient with the small surrenders required to let other people take care of you, which is what a real sick day is.
- Pink Moon — Nick Drake, 1972
Recorded by someone who was, by then, mostly in bed. The album has the particular acoustics of a small room and a slowed pulse, and it gives the sick day back its dignity as a real state rather than an interruption.