To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is a (beautiful) Commitment

 

“What a power was in the human soul! she thought. That woman sitting there writing under the rock resoled everything into simplicity; made these angers, irritations fall off like old rags; she brought together this and that and then this, and so made out of that miserable silliness and spite (she and Charles squabbling, sparring, had been silly and spiteful) something—this scene on the beach for example, this moment of friendship and liking—which survived, after all these years complete, so that she dipped into it to re-fashion her memory of him, and there it stayed in the mind affecting one almost like a work of art” (160)

New rule: no more modernism until college.

After reading Virginia Woolf’s 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, I can conclude that a) I love her writing and b) I will love it even more once I have developed that literary maturity which grows quietly beneath wisdom teeth, disappointment and a tolerance for alcohol. If I end up going to a place like Bryn Mawr, where the famous literary modernist is treated like a second Athena, I will probably meet her again anyways.

She deserves my full attention. Her prose is so full of little gems that, on a first reading, its collective gleam induces blindness. Picking through it requires commitment. But so, according to To the Lighthouse, does life.

“It didn’t matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell?” (118)

The novel follows a middle-aged philosophy professor, his gentle and luminous wife, their eight children and a handful of guests two visits to their summer house in the Hebrides. The Ramsays are the perfect embodiment of the prewar era: domestic and oh-so-British, which means they conceal their churning emotions beneath a foam of civility. When the First World War comes, it batters but does not destroy them, and a few of them are able to find glimmers of meaning through the haze of modern life (this is the fun kind of modernist novel; in the other kind there is no meaning whatsoever). But the real point of interest is their house, which narrates the most interesting part of the story.

Let me say that again: Virginia Woolf writes twenty pages from the perspective of a house! Ten years! Three (parenthetical) deaths! And it’s good! That section, “Time Passes,” is the best—or at least the most obviously-good—part of the whole story. After almost a century and a legion of literary imitators, the power of that house still stands.

If the rest of Virginia Woolf’s fiction is as beautiful—and as intelligent—as To the Lighthouse, then conserving her collection for my later years might be the right choice as well as the cautious one. Each book is a commitment, and I prefer monogamy. I will learn to love her.

Eventually.

“The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one” (161)