When I first read the quote in the heading of this blog, it was in Floyd Skloot's memoir, T he Night-Side: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and the Illness Experience . As someone who has this poorly-named condition (also known as C hronic F atigue I mmune D ysfunction S yndrome or M yalgic E ncephalomeylitis -- CFIDS/ME), Sacks' comment gave meaning to my life at a time when I was struggling to give meaning to losing my health, career, social life, and financial and physical independence. Even if I was sick, I was still a writer. I still had a mind (even if it didn't work as well as it used to) to make sense of the horror and wonder I was living that my peers were not. As I thought about titling a blog in a way that would best describe all the disparate parts of me, this quote eventually came to mind. While it refers to the illness experience, the title "behind the surface" could also describe what I do as an academic studying American Evangelicalism and the Israel/Pal...
"I have since had a deeper sense of the horror and wonder which lurk behind life and which are concealed, as it were, behind the usual surface of health." Oliver Sacks