A Cup of Classics: 2020

This book was my companion as the days got colder, as the shadows got longer, and the world retreated in on itself. In the eerie silence of the new lockdown norm, I had lost the job I'd been offered, and was spending my days sketching and walking down a wooded path to the to the local shops.

Woolf's words were my solace, in a way. I could not have picked up a better book.

Now, an attempt to put my thoughts on this work to paper:

-The prose punctured me; it found its way, light beaming, into the naked crevices of me and there it stayed, pushing and prying at the flimsy skin of studied existential ignorance I'd built for myself over the years.

- Never, since I read Wuthering Heights on a storm-wreaked weekend at the gloriously angst-ridden age of 15, has a book been more perfectly timed.

- Woolf understands. She wrote in spells of madness and madness - it is clear - illuminates. Perhaps it is only when we are teetering on the edge of things that they are thrown, like a lighthouse beam, into sharp relief.

- She writes of the rich, tumultuous existence and careening peaks and troughs of emotion that exist within all of us, rarely seen by others.

- She articulates the fragility and often arbitrary-seeming nature of human relationships. A husband and wife for instance, so close, and simultaneously so very distant from each other. In the course of an evening they go from enemies, to confidantes, to begging love from one another, yet all in subtlety, all played out in nuance.

- The writing on childhood was especially poignant. She writes of one of the youngest children, "He will never be happier than he is right now", as lamented by his mother. In the course of the narrative, this is shown to be resoundingly true. The truth of this temporal and fading childhood happiness smacked me in the jaw. It sounds bleak, and hopeless, that we all get increasingly miserable as we grow. Perhaps it is. But it is nevertheless true.

Woolf rages, and she mourns the fact that children must grow up. Why? She writes as Mrs.Ramsay, Why must they?

- On this note, I loved how she captured the awe and serene reverence that young girls have for their mothers. I wasn't a child in the early 19th century, but she could well have been describing my own memories of "helping" my mother with her jewellery before going out to a posh dinner. "That's my mother" Rose thinks.

Poignant again, because I too eventually lost this childhood awe.

- In fact, so many passages could have been my own thoughts, verbatim, though with marked improvement to their clarity and general wordsmithery.

The underlying anxiety that all of the characters have - from Lily Briscoe in the finale, painting, wondering at truth, to Mrs.Ramsay, finally alone in the light of the lighthouse, wondering if she does good for entirely selfish reasons, to Mr. Ramsay, wondering desperately how to get to Z, to the answer of it all, and instead distracting himself with comforting thoughts of his wife and his 8 children, reminding himself that he is lucky. This muddle, this inner argument and tying and untying of self is familiar.

I have had all of these thoughts, in some way or another. I have this same underlying awareness of some huge, unanswerable question.

The Meaning of Life,

Unanswerable, certainly.

Though To the Lighthouse made me feel a little less alone in the askin.

No comments

Pages

A Cup of Classics

About me

2019 Reading Challenge

Follow Us

Search This Blog

Categories

Popular Posts

Blog Archive