Good For You

Your opening salvo suggests that I should keep my copy of Hermione Lee's biography of Virginia Woolf close at hand. If we are transposing into the key of Stephen, who, I wonder, might Mr. Ramsay be, "lean as a knife, narrow as the blade of one, grinning sarcastically, not only with the pleasure of disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife,...but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement." Leslie Stephen, perhaps?

I had printed some pages of a downloaded e-book of "To the Lighthouse" from Gutenberg. You probably know as well as anyone that I hate reading books from a monitor; thus I had downloaded the first five chapters and decided these as part of the traditional 'summer reading'.

Though I have yet to read any Woolf (haven't started on the ones you gave me) and though I refuse, before I finish Part One, to surf the Internet for any kind of study whatsoever of To the Lighthouse, and thus have no knowledge of the story's context, I recognize early on that Woolf's prose on this one is just the kind I admire. The metaphors ("lean and narrow as the blade of a knife") are startlingly vivid; the narration flows freely like a stream. Woolf's constant usage of the semi-colon reminds me of certain passages I read in "What Maise Knew". Long sentences, long phrases and adjectives - I'm bound often to be lost as to which main verb I am actually at.

Only having gone as far as the beginnings of Chapter Three, I'd imagined the Ramsey's dinner table as perhaps potentially as stifling as the atmosphere at the lighthouse.

"...their fastness in a house where there was no privacy to debate anything, everything; Tansley's tie; the passing of the Reform Bill; sea birds and butterflies; people; while the sun poured into those attics, which a plank alone separated from each other so that every footstep could be plainly heard and the Swiss girl sobbing for her father who was dying of cancer in a valley of the Grisons, and lit up bats, flannels, straw hats, ink-pots, paint-pots, beetles, and the skulls of small birds, while it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds, which was in the towels too, gritty with sand from bathing."

In such a home, how can one possibly amuse himself without the freedom to disagree, much less have an opinion of something? Observations, however keenly made, are unhealthy if kept from activity - intellectual, creative, whatever.

If I'm a writer I'd like to be able to write about the things I see or hear, and not be constricted by the threat of being disagreed with. If I'm a taxpayer and voter, I'd like to be entitled to act on behalf of a people, howsoever I see fit, even if it shall be in the most minute way, if I see that the country "had fallen down and broken (its) legs or arms"; "to see the same dreary" line-up of corrupt politicians and dumb celebrities running every election season", and then a dreadful storm coming.