I went a bit overboard with
To The Lighthouse. There was a bit in the middle that, I admit, lost me, however the rest, to me, was brilliant. The plot is not meant to move forward enticingly; the plot, rather, is Time. What are we doing within the confines of Time? Each person occupies their own space in time; each character carries the story in rapture. The nuances in thought to which one isn't often privy intrigue me. The waves mesmerize me; each character's imagination and sense of self move wavelike through the book, ending where they begin. For example, James has the desire to kill his father right at the front of the book (this could be the peak of the wave); then this wave lulls for the reader, but again peaks at the end when James thinks, "I shall take a knife and strike him to the heart" (184). Lily frustrates me a bit because she fears herself so much. But we all fear ourselves, or fail to trust ourselves, at some point; the key is the overcoming, in which she suddenly frees herself from perceived judgment and has her "vision!"
Lily's vision at the end marks the time when she sees beyond the empty steps, the blurred canvas, the day to day, the fact that her painting will someday be rolled up beneath a sofa, to the clarity of herself, who she is. Though this is her culminating moment of realization, the extensive array of small glimpses of clarity throughout are equally imperative.
Each day, we pass through our routines, and sometimes find ourselves a bit stuck (just as the Ramsays are on the Isle of Skye). But in the midst of the seemingly mundane, every once in a while, one glimpses the meaningful, a small moment that jolts us from our ignorance and enables us to see the importance of the little events in our lives that happen every day.
". . . Mrs. Ramsay sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of 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" (47). All of these simple events, when drawn together form the lives we live; though sometimes one might think life grand and daunting, it all comes back to the rustling of trees, the drive to work, the conversation held in the back yard.
I appreciate Woolf's insight regarding the uniqueness of persons. "How did she differ? What was the spirit in her, the essential thing, by which, had you found a crumpled glove in the corner of a sofa, you would have known it, from its twisted finger, hers indisputably?" (49). Sometimes I think about myself and wonder why I'm me. I think about the biology of my brain, and how it can possibly generate thoughts that vary from the thoughts that other brains produce. Mrs. Ramsay's meditation on the subject nails it down pretty relatably. "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" (62). I'm not exactly sure where to take this, but it definitely relates to Kevin's ruminations on Hopkins' inscape. It's also quite existential which I'll get into more later.
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During dinner, Woolf provides this vision:
". . . for the night was now shut off by panes of glass, which, far from giving any accurate view of the outside world, rippled it so strangely that here, inside the room, seemed to be order and dry land; there, outside, a reflection in which things wavered and vanished, waterily. Some change at once went through them all, as if this had really happened, and they were all conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island; had their common cause against that fluidity out there" (97). It is dreamlike and generates a sense of illusion. How do we distinguish between real and imagination? Woolf says, "as if this had really happened." So, did it?
What a wild moment when Mrs. Ramsay focuses in on the fleeting nature of time and of things. "With her foot on the threshold she waited a moment longer in a scene which was vanishing even as she looked, and then, as she moved and took Minta's arm and left the room, it changed, it shaped itself differently; it had become, she knew, giving one last look at it over her shoulder, already the past" (111). The room seems to morph in front of her eyes. Things are always changing, but we forget to take notice.
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The following remark carries a Biblical tone:
"He covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only" (128). The harms and harshness of life must exist to keep man within his realm. Men only glimpse the divine, the anagogic. For this reason, there are seasons and cycles of death and rebirth. Our world is not divine perfection, but rather operates in a constant state of change that rolls us through both suffering and success.
The third chapter, for me, focuses solidly on inscape. "What does one do? Why is one sitting here, after all?" (146). It brings me back to my
post on Marcus Aurelius.
"17. In human life time is but a point, reality a flux, perception indistinct, the composition of the body subject to easy corruption, the soul a spinning top, fortune hard to make out, fame confused. To put it briefly: physical things are but a flowing stream, things of the soul dreams and vanity; life is but a struggle and the visit to a strange land, posthumous fame but a forgetting." (Aurelius 16-7)
I think Lily feels like a spinning top in the third chapter especially. When Mr. Ramsay craves her sympathy, all she manages to do is stand there stupefied until she blurts out "What beautiful boots!" of all things. She cannot launch out from her comfort zone because she is afraid of who she is; she fears her painting, her reality, her purpose in life.
