First of all, this is the first Virginia Woolf I have read. On one hand, I am bummed having gone through life until now without her insight, but as Randy Travis would say - on the other hand. I have so much Woolf to consume.
This book is just fantastic. Her style is unlike anything I have encountered. The reader is bounced from one character’s thoughts to another’s. Some of the “On Writing” style books warn not to use voice-over or inner dialogue, but here it is essential. Writers who create full characters that prop the story up on their own impress me. Fill a book with just one and you are golden. Steinbeck does it with dozens, but that’s another story - literally. Here, Woolf weaves deep imagery from within the characters’ minds. She takes a blank canvas at the onset and builds brush stroke after brush stroke layering a deep and connectable portrait. By the second act, the reader is intimately familiar with a handful of characters from the inside looking out. This painting motif spans the whole of the novel as we see Lily Briscoe struggling to paint - to paint life itself. Painting is, after all, one’s interpretation of objects.
…she took her hand and raised her brush. For a moment it stayed trembling in a painful but exciting ecstasy in the air. Where to begin?–that was the question. At what point to make the first mark? One line placed on the canvas committed her to innumerable risks, to frequent and irrevocable decisions. All that in idea seemed simple became in practice immediately complex; as the waves shape themselves symmetrically from the clifftop, but to the swimmer among them are divided by steep gulfs and foaming crests. Still, the risk must run; the mark made.
Woolf can be lachrymose, but where she induces sadness, she lifts the veil on the human psyche in a way completely her own, yet universal. There is a rhythm to this book - presumably a Woolf thing. It may take some readers a while to settle into the pace. I certainly did. It is easy to lose track whose thoughts you may or may not be following. Like a 5/8 jazz groove*, once you find it, it feels right. Until you do, things are uneasy as you stumble to find cadence on the downbeat.
About here, she thought, dabbling her fingers in the water, a ship had sunk, and she muttered, dreamily half asleep, how we perished, each alone.
There are so many stunning passages in this book. How Woolf can dish many a lifetime worth of epiphanies and poignant lamentations is beyond reality. Reading, I mark passages that make me rethink the heavy stuff: life, love, quotidian banalities. I stopped marking a third of the way in. The heavy stuff is too numerous to keep track of. Focus is key while reading To The Lighthouse. Any line may contain the next potential shotgun blast to the heart.
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.
When people tell me they only read non-fiction because they prefer to learn when they read, I immediately file them in the disposable characters category. Woolf is a great answer to the misinformed and erudite. Read this. Learn about life. Learn about passions. Learn about loss. Learn about understanding. It is all here in under 250 pages. If you finish it without laughing out loud, crying yourself to sleep, and rethinking what you are doing or have done with your life your operating system needs updating - you ain’t human. Spend a weekend with this one. Stick with it. Find Virginia’s pace and let her pull back the curtain.
Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
To the Lighthouse by Virgina Woolf
- 5/8 is a musical form with 5 eighth-notes per measure. Traditional western music has 4 quarter-notes per measure or 8 eighth-notes. The waltz is an exception with 3 quarter notes. Listen to Take 5 by Bill Evans to hear 5/8. Try counting 1-2-3-4-5 in rhythm. Next, listen to something like Johnny B. Goode by Chuck Berry in 4/4 and count 1-2-3-4. Now go buy a pack of smokes and a pork-pie hat. You are a bonafide, gin-soaked jazzer with rockabilly stylings.