To the Lighthouse

Text read: To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Number of pages: 310

Number of reading days: 8

Why I read this book: Virginia Woolf. I am a little obsessed with Virginia Woolf.

Also this quote via Samara: "She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of–to think; well not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others."

Thoughts:

I adore Virginia Woolf. And her writing. To the Lighthouse did not disappoint (not that I expected it to). I could probably babble on and on about this novel but I'll try holding to just a few of this book's attractive features.

First: the water imagery. Virginia and I share a strange fascination with water and specifically, large bodies of water. Here is one of my favorite "water" passages:

"...so that the monotonous fall of the waves on the beach, which for the most part beat a measured and soothing tattoo to her thoughts and seemed consolingly to repeat over and over again as she sat with the children the words of some old cradle song, murmured by nature, 'I am guarding you--I am your support,' but at other times suddenly and unexpectedly, especially when her mind raised itself slightly from the task actually in hand, had no such kindly meaning, but like a ghostly roll of drums remorselessly beat the measure of life, made one think of the destruction of the island and its engulfment in the sea, and warned her whose day had slipped past in one quick doing after another that it was all ephemeral as a rainbow--this sound which had been obscured and concealed under the other sounds suddenly thundered hollow in her ears and made her look up with an impulse of terror."

This passage perfectly captures my relationship with the ocean--at once beautiful, nurturing, loving and terrifying, dangerous, destructive. Sublime.

One of the main themes of this novel is the complexity of human relationships. How do we know people? Can we truly know people? What is intimacy? Woolf seems interested in this issue of knowing as similar questions are raised in Mrs. Dalloway, published two years before To the Lighthouse. It's a topic of great interest for me as well.

"And this, Lily thought, taking the green paint on her brush, this making up scenes about them, is what we call 'knowing' people, 'thinking' of them, 'being fond' of them!

I love reading Woolf's writing because she expresses thoughts and feelings that I have experienced all my life but have never had the words for. I recognize myself in her characters and in the subjects she questions and discusses. This book would have been lovely to study in class (with my brilliant Modernist London professor to be exact). I'm still mulling over the wonderfully written passages and Lily Briscoe's painting and the dinner scene and the interesting little Part Two entitled, "Time Passes" (vaguely reminiscent of Shakespeare's Time monologues used to inform the audience that sixteen years or so have gone by). Just lovely.

Favorite Passages & Quotes:

"How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking?"

"Never did anybody look so sad. Bitter and black, half-way down, in the darkness, in the shaft which ran from the sunlight to the depths, perhaps a tear formed; a tear fell; the waters swayed this way and that, received it, and were at rest. Never did anybody look so sad."

"To pursue truth with such astonishing lack of consideration for other people's feelings, to rend the thin veils of civilisation so wantonly, so brutally, was to her so horrible an outrage of human decency..."

"...how strangely he was venerable and laughable at one and the same time."

"...how life, from being made up of a little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
"What device for becoming, like waters poured into one jar, inextricably the same, one with the object one adored? Could the body achieve, or the mind, subtly mingling in the intricate passages of the brain? or the heart? Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs. Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscriptions on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge..."

"It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself."
"He was not 'in love' of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many."

"For how could one express in words these emotions of the body? express that emptiness there? ... It was one's body feeling, not one's mind."

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For other books I'm reading this summer, see: Summer Reading List 2012