Life does not only mean life.

‘Life’ in the ancient Greek is either bios (biological life) or zoe (divine, supernatural life) and the trouble is that one word can’t usefully mean both. There is the physical world, and there is our interior world. We can try valiantly to elide these distinct meanings but, as Hermione’s paintings remind us, there is something fundamentally irreconcilable about our internal truth and whatever real ground on which we find ourselves standing.

Switches flick on, and off.

Interiority can mean home, safety, sanctuary, or it can mean skating closer to the borders of unconscious knowledge than is strictly advisable. We’re all walking a line. In Susan Sontag’s framing, “everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick”; and Hermione’s citizenship can’t fail to inform her gaze. The prosaic and limited interiors of her sick bed (light-switches, chinoiserie motifs, husbands, doctors) become abstracted and mobilised to explain her place in the world. Illness presents as an extreme, heightened femininity.