A Way of Knowing People

She did not know what he had done, when he heard that Andrew was killed, but still she felt it in him all the same.  They only mumbled at each other on staircases; they looked up at the sky and said it will be fine or it won't be fine.  But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail, to sit in one's garden and look at the slopes of a hill running purple down into the distant heather.  She knew him in that way.  She knew that he had changed somehow.  She had never read a line of his poetry.  She thought that she knew how it went though, slowly and sonorously.  It was seasoned and mellow.  It was about the desert and the camel.  It was about the palm tree and the sunset.  It was extremely impersonal; it said something about death; it said very little about love.

To The Lighthouse, (first published 1928) Chapter 11, Part Three: The Lighthouse.

When I was reading this, even without knowing how or why, I felt that this was important.  I felt that there was something vital in this that I must grasp at all costs.  I believe that I have one finger around it now.  Hopefully by the end of my life my whole fist will encircle it. 

I think that this is the way with me a lot of the time.  Knowing someone by the outline - assuming how the rest of them will follow.  And then it also occured to me that this is probably how many people see me, and their friends, and so many other people.  Obviously and trying hard to be unchliched, it is the simplest thing in the world to get the 'gist' of someone.  Get the general idea.  Or not even that.  Get a glimpse of an idea.  And then like a colour by numbers, we fill in the rest of that person with our imagination.  I can't tell you that you know what I mean, but I would imagine that a lot of people do.

With the rest of the person, we add whatever seems fitting.  Whats-his-face said this and then did that, so I think that they are...  It's a kind of knowing, but it's a kind of guessing, and of course the person gets no credit for personality.  We fixed them up with a disposition that is, chances are, ridiculously wrong. 

I think that the point that I'm trying or failing to make is not that you shouldn't do this.  I think that it happens without our consent.  I think it's more along the lines of being open.  That is chliched, isn't it?  Uggh.  Not too much I can fix about that.

'Sitting on the World'

Here sitting on the world, she thought, for she could not shake herself free from the sense that everything this morning was happening for the first time, perhaps for the last time, as a traveller, even though he is half asleep, knows, looking out of the train window, that he must look now, for he will never see that town, or that mule cart, or that woman in the fields again.  The lawn was the world; they were up here together, on this exalted station, she thought, looking at old Mr. Carmichael, who seemed (though they had not said a word all this time) to share her thoughts.  And she would never see him again perhaps.  He was growing old.  Also, she remembered, smiling at the slipper that dangled from his foot, he was growing famous. 

This is a an excerpt from Chapter 11 of Part Three: The Lighthouse, of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.  My dears, don't wait for me to give you an idea.  Think about what you have just read.  Did you really read it? 

I love to share my thoughts with you, but my dears, I don't want you to depend on me.  This paragraph contains some very heavy ideas, that caused me to sigh sadly and heavily as I rethought them. 

I love the idea of 'sitting on the world'.  This is a thought that I have so often mused, even as a young child.  I would just think about it.  Think about the world as a ball.  Think of it rotating, orbiting.  Think of myself planted on the surface, going around with it, going upside down, gravity and I just going around and upside down.  It is a thought which has the effect of making me feel incredibly small and alone, and yet in awe of size and time which no one can control.  Maybe the only thing that NO ONE can control.

Time continues.  Blink and you missed it.  I think my darling Woolf has a better grasp of Time as time than anyone I have ever known.  She talks of watching and seeing things because it might never be seen again.  Things get old.  Things grow away.  Things become famous and so get old and grow away at the same time.  I am only extremely young to the world, and so don't you dare suspect me of knowing much, but still.  I hear what Woolf says, and though I may not have a mature understanding of it just yet, I look forward to twenty years time for when I can re-listen to her voice and learn the meaning.  Perhaps that will be the both of us.

Spring and Summer in 'To The Lighthouse'

The Spring without a leaf to toss, bare and bright like a virgin fierce in her chastity, scornful in her purity, was laid out on fields wide-eyed and watchful and entirely careless of what was done or thought by the beholders.

And now in the heat of summer the wind sent its spies about the house again. Flies wove a web in the sunny rooms; weeds that had grown close to the glass in the night tapped methodically at the window pane. When darkness fell, the stroke of the Lighthouse, which had laid itself with such authority upon the carpet in the darkness, tracing its pattern, came now in the softer light of spring mixed with moonlight gliding gently as if it laid its caress and lingered stealthily and looked and came lovingly again. But in the very lull of this loving caress, as the long stroke leant upon the bed, the rock was rent asunder; another fold of the shawl loosened; there it hung, and swayed. Through the short summer nights and the long summer days, when the empty rooms seemed to murmur with the echoes of the fields and the hum of flies, the long streamer waved gently, swayed aimlessly; while the sun so striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.

My dears, these two paragraph that you have just read are two excerpts from Chapter 6, Part 2: Time Passes, of Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, (first published 1927).  I apologize for this long-winding way of siting the paragraphs, but I must do so in the case that there are copyright complications. 

I feel that Virginia Woolf's way of describing Spring is so vibrant and fresh.  It paints a picture in my mind of Spring as a fierce, vivacious, girl.  I can just see her twirling in an emerald green dress, all spattered with laughing daisies, chin up, eyes ingenuously open, hands spread wide to receive bunches of grass and leaves.  I really love it.  She is innocent, but she is also strong.  That is how I see her.  Don't those short and simple words just paint a picture that is so complex and profound? 

...while the sun so striped and barred the rooms and filled them with yellow haze that Mrs McNab, when she broke in and lurched about, dusting, sweeping, looked like a tropical fish oaring its way through sun-lanced waters.

I love this.  Isn't there so much story in it?  I can smell honey and fresh cut grass on a salty breeze.  It reminds me so much of when I think of home when I'm on holiday.  I think about it sitting silent and empty, full of sunlight and emotions fossilised in time until our return.  This excerpt depicts a period when nobody is in the house, and a single maid maintains it.  She looks after it and keeps it exactly as it was for when  the family comes homes, but years pass.  It is exactly as though the emotions and events that were felt and experienced in that house are fossilised in time, and kept clean and ready for them by Mrs McNab.  Isn't it full of story?