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To The Lighthouse: "It seemed….such nonsense inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that."
To The Lighthouse: "It seemed….such nonsense inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that."
To The Lighthouse: "It seemed….such nonsense inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that."
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To The Lighthouse: "It seemed….such nonsense inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that."

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Adeline Virginia Woolf ( 1882 - 28th March 1941) is one of Britain’s leading literary talents and a pioneer of modernist writing especially ‘stream of consciousness’ which provides the reader with the flow of thoughts from the naked inner voice without any filter, order or arrangement. She overcame sexual abuse from her brothers, the death of her mother and then sister in her childhood but it was the death of her father as a young adult that institutionalised her. These dark emotional episodes were to reappear at different times throughout her life but did not prevent her prolific output of some of the most poignant and poetic prose ever written. This is undoubtedly evident in To the Lighthouse a vivid narrative of the Ramsey family and their holiday to the Scottish Isle of Skye where they dream of reaching the remote, inaccessible but ever present lighthouse that stands the same in an ever changing world. The novel minutely details a portrait of each family member that reveals truths on childhood, parenthood and marriage together with the meaning of time and memory.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 11, 2013
ISBN9781780006918
To The Lighthouse: "It seemed….such nonsense inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that."
Author

Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf was an English novelist, essayist, short story writer, publisher, critic and member of the Bloomsbury group, as well as being regarded as both a hugely significant modernist and feminist figure. Her most famous works include Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and A Room of One’s Own.

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Rating: 3.8885968199145577 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There are books I’ve had on my shelves that I have always meant to read, and that I feel I ought to have read. To The Lighthouse was one of those books, so I took it with me on holiday and read it.But I didn’t really know what it was about, and it’s a strange book to encounter if you have no preconceptions. The first section, with its cloyingly deep analysis of the minutia of life, hundreds of pages where nothing much happens except they go to dinner, all the Meaning trapped in ‘do you think it will be fine enough to go to the Lighthouse tomorrow?’ ‘No, I think it will not be fine’. Marriage and motherhood and thwarted career ambitions and hosting and matchmaking, and the way the smallest thing can hold so much meaning. I found it quite intractable and frustrating at first, and then found a rhythm and a sympathy and settled into it...... when all at once I hit the second part and the book simultaneously broke my brain and my heart. Ten years pass in a flurry of pages. People we had known down to the grain on their fingerprints are casually dispatched in passing in the final sentence of a paragraph. The house slowly decays, the bubble that has been there so clearly is gone, as the dust and mould creep in.And then in the final part we are there again, and are drawn into musing around what fingerprints do we leave on the world, how are we remembered, what is success? Those complex family relationships, so much love and anger tangled up,and all inside, no ripples on the surface. But we paint. And we make it to the Lighthouse.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book reads more like a poem than a novel. Evocative, fragile, nuanced, ephemeral moments of family life set in a gorgeous landscape. It would make a beautiful arthouse movie with long scenes filled with stark seascapes and little action.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    3-2-17
    Tonight I finished Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

    Wowzers, it’s really great. This was my first reading of Woolf, and I was really hypnotized by her style. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend you ride it. A very quick read, under 200 pages, and it just flows and flows. Lyrical.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    3-2-17
    Tonight I finished Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse.”

    Wowzers, it’s really great. This was my first reading of Woolf, and I was really hypnotized by her style. It was an emotional rollercoaster, and I highly recommend you ride it. A very quick read, under 200 pages, and it just flows and flows. Lyrical.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Took me a while to finally get around to reading a Virginia Woolf book. Not sure why. Maybe it was her trashing of James Joyce ("the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating."). Maybe since she was critical of a book that had far more originality and seamlessly woven psychology in its prose than in her offerings--and she once had let this slip in a diary entry that her attempts were “probably being better done by Mr. Joyce.” But since "To the Lighthouse" seems regarded as an exemplar of stream of consciousness, it was only a matter of time before I dug into it. I found beautiful phrases warring with each other in the same sentence, strangled by punctuation, cordoned from the rest of the paragraph in endless parenthetical digressions. The second part had me interested with its jump in time and smashing of a plodding expectation. And then the third part took control of the reins with some truly great moments of uninterrupted thought-flow, only rarely sliding into the ruts with the irksome "he thought/she thought" or needless diversion or mixed metaphor. I know it was supposed to resemble thought, but at times it felt more like grasping at a style. And, as I’ve said, it had already been done better.In any case, those brilliant passages deserve their time in the sun, planted beside the stalwart side of a lighthouse that seems to alternate between unattainability and naked shivering reality."So some random light directing them from an uncovered star, or wandering ship, or the Lighthouse even, with its pale footfall upon stair and mat, the little airs mounted the staircase and nosed round bedroom doors. But here surely, they must cease. Whatever else may perish and disappear what lies here is steadfast. Here one might say to those sliding lights, those fumbling airs, that breathe and bend over the bed itself, here you can neither touch nor destroy. Upon which, wearily, ghostlily, as if they had feather-light fingers and the light persistency of feathers, they would look, once, on the shut eyes and the loosely clasping fingers, and fold their garments wearily and disappear.""So much depends then, thought Lily Briscoe, looking at the sea which had scarcely a stain on it, which was so soft that the sails and the clouds seemed set in its blue, so much depends, she thought, upon distance . . ."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Zeer moeilijke lectuur, maar met ongelofelijk veel intellectueel genoegen. Gaat over eindigheid en dood, kijken naar het leven. Zeer beeldend. Om te herlezen en herlezen.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Absolutely breathtaking literature.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Exquisite. (*****)
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I feel like I need cliff notes and a college level lecture on this one. There was just so much going on in this...every sentence heavy with meaning and infused with hidden feeling. The inner lives of Edwardians who perhaps grew up in the Victorian era...so repressed and filled with the expectations of society, struggling not to be themselves, but to even find themselves in the first place.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Not much of a plot in this work of dreamy prose. But still worth a read, if just to suck from the marrow of these sentences. Being a short work one, can read it over and over again.,
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Each time I read _To the Lighthouse_ I am reminded of Virginia Woolf's profound understanding of the human condition, or perhaps I should say, as Mrs. Ramsay does, "a community of feeling with other people." But even that's a reductive way of putting it, because I mean so much more: that reading this book is like entering into deeper awareness, feeling more alive. For me, this is her truest book, and it sets the bar for everything else I read. This is what is possible, that art can expand our notions of how we understand one another, of what written language can do that nothing else can. Were I to read only one book for the rest of my life, this is the one I would choose—and I could never exhaust it.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Finally managed to get through this and get something out of it. The stream of consciousness style is very difficult, possibly because the main characters are eminently dislikeable. The description of the empty house moving through the years is stunning, and easily the strongest part of the book.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Once again, I discover how much I admire Woolf's observational skills and can't stand her writing. For some reason, I seem to need to rediscover that every four or five years.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    What a treat to read a masterpiece. I love the way Virginia Woolf writes weaving the story through the thoughts of each character. The silence of her characters held by unspoken rules and expectations they live their lives on the edge of what’s expected of them and what they want to question.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was my second Woolf book and I'm no closer to being a fan of this author than at any other time of my life. Lighthouse was much more enjoyable than Waves, but I won't be rereading either of them any time soon.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I read this book in university and I remembered I didn't like it. So this summer I decided to read it again to find out why I didn't like it. I soon realized the reason. It is a very confusing book for me to try and read. The sentences go on forever which makes me forget what I was reading about in the first place. I have read the first 8 chapters and I barely know what is going on so I've decided to put the book back on the shelf.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand, I found it frustrating to read, as little actually occurred in the book, with the content made up almost entirely of the leisurely musings of the English upper-class. On the other, I enjoyed the thoughts on art and I liked seeing the character of Lily grow into a more confident artist. I had some inner laughs at Mr. Ramsay, who in the second half of the novel finds himself in a difficult place without his wife to consistently praise him and his work. I did find the style in which this book was written, the focus on perception without much dialogue or action, difficult to read and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone who is wary of those writing styles.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Although I think I like Mrs. Dalloway better, this wasn't bad.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I liked this book for its style and the introspection of its characters. The themes of life and death, and transience and permanence are universal and the reader is left to draw his/her own conclusions.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    peculiar but interesting; just not a huge fan of literature for arts' sake alone.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    My first Virginia Woolf book! Maybe Virginia Woolf books are like Christopher Guest movies in that the first one you read/see is forever afterwards your favorite.

    I'm not used to "identifying" with characters in books, even though that's how a lot of people (high school students) talk about what they read. As in: "This book is, like, all about tragedy and loss, and I can TOTALLY IDENTIFY with that because my parents just took my convertible keys away and I'm really sad about it. So I really know how the legless orphans feel."

    To The Lighthouse is special though because I can say about Lily Briscoe and the Ramsays, "They are me and I them." Not that that makes me special; the conflicts and emotions are pretty universal. It just so happens that Woolf's way of phrasing things (tangentially, both vague and impossibly detailed) is one that I find easier to understand than most.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    For the first 180 pages I was asking myself, "What's the point?" But then everything came together at the end. Woolf is genius in that she writes about incredibly deep themes in concise and simple (not to mention beautiful) narratives.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This was a very nicely written book. Ms. Woolf really has a way with words. It so lyrical yet so common. I would have given it 5 stars but it was not a book that is easy to read. It was a bit uninteresting but don't get me wrong, this is a good book. The plot was okay and it turned out a bit sad in the end. Ms. Woolf's words can actually bring you to tears but it took me a long time to finish it. It is not a book you read in one sitting.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This novel really covers just 2 days in the life of the Ramsay family at their vacation home in the Hebrides on the Isle of Skye. On the first day, Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay and their 8 children have invited an eclectic set of guests to their home for vacation. Everyone is hoping to make a trip to the lighthouse the next day, but the weather is looking ominous and the trip will most likely be cancelled. Nothing earth shattering happens on this day - very little action - but the novel shifts among the thoughts of the different people in the story. The central character is Mrs. Ramsay, who is the glue who holds the family together. She is always watching out for her children, guests, and her intellectual husband. There is an interlude - a chapter titled 'Time Passes' in which several years elapse and the house lies empty. The final section is a day when the family returns to the house and a small group finally make the expedition to the lighthouse. But during the years in between many changes have occurred - the children have grown up, one dies in the war, one dies in childbirth and surprisingly, Mrs. Ramsay, the heart of the family, also has died.

    I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this story, given that really there is no real plot. But I loved the wandering thoughts of the different characters and I really enjoyed discovering the personality and essence of Mrs. Ramsay - not only through her thoughts, but through the thoughts of her children and guests. A great book if you're in a quiet introspective mood.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Prickling rivulets of conscience, smoothly shifting from one to another, sailing the waters, relentlessly dragged by the current of a greater force, a guiding voice, Mrs. Ramsay’s. She alone can conduct this tuneless orchestra of wandering souls towards the open seas where they can become one single stream and fulfill their destiny. The lighthouse is waiting, the darkness in between the flashing beam lights showing the way. Isn’t it in absence where utter understanding is achieved?Mrs. Ramsay appears as the highest priestess of relationship. Devoted wife, protective mother, the perfect hostess, she spreads her Greek beauty around unreservedly, blessing the ones who are lucky enough to cross her path with her loving touch.Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay’s might be the most balanced and beautiful depiction of marriage I have ever read , where mutuality and consent emerge as the overriding sentiments. Her roundness soothes his sharpness, her constant reassurance atones for his endless need for sympathy, her feminine intuition cradles his masculine authority. All this giving and receiving occurs in silent conversations, a mundane but nonetheless epic journey takes place at every second to move from one person to another, an indestructible shared bond defies any well-researched defense, for Mrs. and Mr. Ramsay are united beyond words. Woolf’s weaves a complex world where gender roles become sustained by marital entrenchment with flowing battle of wills, where pulling and pushing, attraction and repellence, adoration and revulsion are perfectly wedded in Mrs. Ramsay’s life, balancing “relationship” and “self”. And yet some passages ooze with frustration at not being able to overcome those insurmountable barriers, both physical and mental, that define our existence, forcing self-exploration.“(…) and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others.” Page 95Ultimately, Mrs. Ramsay’s chooses to sacrifice her individuality for the sake of love for others. I wonder. Where has the cause for individual agency and equality gone? For this heroine Mrs. Ramsay embodies seems a bit pre-historic to me. The role of women in Western Societies has evolved. Hasn’t it?Wait a minute, am I the only one who trembles with recognition here?Miss Lily Briscoe appears as the perfect counterpoint to Mrs. Ramsay’s natural fertility. Lily comes to fight for the plight of women’s independence, exploring the issues of feminism and aesthetics. Art promises much more than marriage to Lily, who is not ready to succumb to any male demands.And so it seems that Lily renounces to her nature for the sake of art itself. She struggles to capture the essence of all things with her brush, her inadequacy pierces her soul, she aches for a kind of pure beauty that won’t come back. She suffers, art is sacrifice.I sat beside Mrs. Ramsay and Lily Briscoe and became myself.But the full magnificence of this novel didn’t come to me until the last part of the narrative. Woolf’s lyrical geniality comes to completion when one realizes this novel is not about two modes of being, it is not about inner struggles to find balance between individuality and connection with others.Time passes, great wars are fought, loved ones are taken away from us in the form of merciless brackets. Red and gold leaves drift by the window, signaling the autumn of life. Winter songs are played in the lighthouse, where all ends meet.Woolf’s final blow relays in the humbling lesson, in the essential trip the reader must undergo to acknowledge his frailty, his evanescence. We are only passing through. It is not our incessant warring within ourselves that threatens relationships with others, but death. For it is Death which separates permanently.Can our bonds survive the passage of time, the challenge of death? “We perished, each alone” is the message of the air and the sea, as well as Mr. Ramsay’s litany. But Woolf’s magic invocation can bring our loved ones back to life, just as memory can resurrect the long gone. Our lives might be ethereal, but art has the power to make us eternal. Connection can be achieved when the lighthouse is reached, when the knitting is completed, when the web is woven. We can cross that boundless bridge of darkness making our trip, as Lily does, through art. And the divine art is the story."The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one." Page 120
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This is a difficult book to read and to like unless you've reached that state of mind where you can digest words without even actively trying to understand the whole winding paragraphs. 'To the Lighthouse' is a story by several multiple POV characters that centered around the existence of the lighthouse and the metaphors around the interaction and characterization of the book's residents. Virginia Woolf uses a literary technique called stream of consciousness where every character in this book have a chance to be the narrator's voice without the necessity of an observant out of the picture narrator as the narratives of each of the characters somehow bloated up the book enough that the plot is even rendered unnecessary.

    And this is the essay I did on the book : "Lighthouse" in a sense, a building guiding light penetrating the darkness of the ocean. It emphasize directly on the novel which was mostly surround itself with the inner workings of the minds and as a way to enable the characterization progression and it gave a scope of understanding through the depth of each personalities and psychologically. Although the plot of the novel was given less consideration but can be wholly redefined as the focus of the novel was foremost the characterizations. Those includes; what a person thinks or do things and what motivate them or what was their desires and their hopes which was magnified by just using words. Woolf had carefully paraphrase the multivariate narrations without compromising on the stylistic substances but its not hard to avoid being displaced by the continuous writing and the ephemeral quality of its prose. She managed to sum up human values and its intricacies between seemingly contradictory characters and unfailingly giving each their own personal voices surrounding the events inside the story. Mrs Ramsey was the most prominent voice throughout the novel. Her observation on the world and people around her was contrasted differently between her and her family and friends. Mr Ramsey provided a darker side that was a direct contrast to Mrs Ramsey. However, the style of the book compensate his actions as the narrative give an insight to his characterization down to his deep insecurity and how Mrs Ramsey complement him in their relationship. The novel provide a pathway of greater understanding of the relationship between each other and how it correlates and subsequently resulted in changes or character developments. In a way, "To The Lighthouse" is a coming of age novel at its core and as a guiding light toward a greater form of humanity.

    But this book is extremely exhausting to read in one sitting. I've read this a few times with audiobooks and I still don't know how on earth a person could write this way. Since someone said that this style is also used in Joyce's Ulysses, I am taking even a step farther away from that book. I don't think I have the right age to read this. I probably will mellow down in years and retry reading this book with a different perspective.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    This one is very difficult to rate. I try to use the Goodreads star labels as strict guidelines and I didn't think "it was ok"; however, I gave it two stars because I acknowledge that it's not fair to give it only one star just because it was mostly incomprehensible to me. It did have moments of brilliance, notably in the poetic language of the “Time Passes” interlude. I'm glad I read this, but I don't think I'll be attempting any more Woolf in the near future.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5

    Virigina Woolf published To the Lighthouse, her most autobiographical novel, in 1927. She is said to have written it as a way of "understanding and dealing with unresolved issues concerning both her parents." Woolf's husband aptly coined this masterpiece, a "psychological poem."

    Like Woolfe's The Waves, TTL is stream of consciousness with concentration on introspection rather than speech or action. Its power soars in small gestures. Large events occur only as an aside, in brackets. Woolf avoids raw emotion, for the most part, dwelling more on interrelationships and qualities of mind and manners.

    Part I of the novel describes an afternoon and evening from one of the Ramsay family's visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland around 1920. Descriptions were certainly inspired by Woolf's family rental of Talland House in St. Ives. In Part II, ten years pass and the Ramsay's home goes to ruin. This image mirrors the death of Woolf's mother when Virginia was thirteen. In Part III, over the course of a single morning, members of the Ramsay family revisit the house and travel to the lighthouse, just as Virginia had visited Talland House after WWI and her father's death.

    I was amazed by the weaving and rhythmn of the poetry pose and its ability to absorb the flow of my thoughts into the novel's scenes with much the same result as I experience while sitting, say, in a botanical garden. The meditation settles deep, expressing qualities, subtle and indirect, so gently they permeate rather than shout their illumination.

    Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay are middle-aged parents of eight children. While love has lost its bloom, they love one another in a needy and appreciative way. Mrs. Ramsay is beautiful, and is at once liked and disliked by others. Her children love her. The father is interesting, brooding, complex and disliked by his children, in general. The dynamic changes as the novel progresses, showing the intransience of relationships, and houses.

    My favorite sections belong to Mrs. Ramsay, and to the description of the house in ruins. The poetry and complexity wooed me beyond mere entertainment, and although I've given entertaining books 5 stars, I give TTL 4.75 stars because I use a different scale for magnificant, literay works such as this. The novel was close to perfection, but not quite. The last note, or fragrance, seemed off, a collaspe of an ending when I wanted, expected, something else. Perhaps life is like that. I look forward to reading Mrs. Dalloway in the near future.

    P.S. On a different note, I felt a bit sensitive to Woolf's portrayal of women's minds as vague and less capable than men's in areas such as serious thought, spatical relations, navigations, etc. Her female characters recognized some of their strenghts, but they held their accomplishments a peg or two below men. Bram Stoker's Dracula female characters were self-effacing in much the same way, as low in confidence as children. Such were the beliefs of the time, and it is little wonder that breaking out of limiting mentalties was and is so difficult for both men and women.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    “She felt... 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. ” Now this is the first Virginia Woolf book that I have read but having done a little bit of research beforehand know that it is probably the most widely read and auto-biographical of her works.The book is split into 3 seperate parts 'The Window','Time Passes' and 'The Lighthouse'. In the first part the Ramsays, their 8 children and assorted house guests are all staying at their holiday home. On the surface it is the ideal family gathering but this is deceiving as their are seething tensions under the surface. A trip is planned but never taken to the nearby lighthouse. In the third part after a hiatus of 10 years in which Mrs Ramsay and 2 of the children have died, Prue in childbirth and Andrew in the trenches of WWI,the trip is finally made. The middle section tells more of the house than its occupants but it is here that the deaths are reported, in block brackets almost like newsflashes and somehow remote.Now as a male parent I found the overall message in this book rather troubling as Mr Ramsay is seen as strict, remote and always craving to be the centre of attention. It is he who interupts the well being of the family. He steps in front of a window interupting the intimacy between a child and its mother, he almost knocks over Lily's easel interupting an artist from the painting but primarily it is he who forbids the visit to the lighthouse in Part 1. In contrast Mrs Ramsay as the one who manages the fabric of the family endlessly knitting and matchmaking as she hates seperation in all forms. This too is seen in the author's syntax. Mr Ramsay's, when he speaks or the narator speaks for him, does so in disjointed sentences and random quotations whereas Mrs Ramsay's sentences are much more fluid. Even in death Mrs Ramsay her memory is still seen as unifying. Whilst this portrayal of parenting is probably true it is still a little unsettling to read.Yet the final part also shows that we are all also shaped by events of both present and past. There is a suggestion that the family as a whole will not truly be able to move on. A certain realisation that things are never so black and white.So why only 3 stars? Was it just my discomfort as a parent? Well quite frankly I did not really enjoy the whole 'stream of consciousness' style of writing and generally found the overall lack of action rather tedious. It got 3 stars because of its originality, pure and simple
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I thought that I would be put off by the writing style - but I actually found the "stream of thought" worked well for me.
    However, as I read this novel, regarded by many as one of the greatest of the 20th century, I had moments where I was jarred by something and it took me a while to understand it. The story, at least at a superficial level, tells the story of a married couple, their eight children, and various hanger-on'ers during a vacation in the North of Scotland. I kept being jarred in the narrative and thought to myself that here is a story about a mother, a father, and some children and I don't think the writer ever had children. A quick check confirmed that she never had children - and so it begs that question; can someone really tell the internal narrative stream-of-thought style of someone raising children when they haven't done it. Once I had decided that, I was jarred the entire rest of the novel and I'm pretty sure that wasn't her intention (there are other more jarring and purposeful bits). At the end, though, I enjoyed it much more than I was expecting. It is more than worthy of a re-read at a future date.

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To The Lighthouse - Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf - To the Lighthouse

Contents

To The Lighthouse

Virginia Woolf – A Biography

THE WINDOW

 1

 Yes, of course, if it's fine tomorrow, said Mrs. Ramsay. But you'll have to be up with the lark, she added.

To her son these words conveyed an extraordinary joy, as if it were settled, the expedition were bound to take place, and the wonder to which he had looked forward, for years and years it seemed, was, after a night's darkness and a day's sail, within touch. Since he belonged, even at the age of six, to that great clan which cannot keep this feeling separate from that, but must let future prospects, with their joys and sorrows, cloud what is actually at hand, since to such people even in earliest childhood any turn in the wheel of sensation has the power to crystallise and transfix the moment upon which its gloom or radiance rests, James Ramsay, sitting on the floor cutting out pictures from the illustrated catalogue of the Army and Navy stores, endowed the picture of a refrigerator, as his mother spoke, with heavenly bliss. It was fringed with joy. The wheelbarrow, the lawnmower, the sound of poplar trees, leaves whitening before rain, rooks cawing, brooms knocking, dresses rustling, all these were so coloured and distinguished in his mind that he had already his private code, his secret language, though he appeared the image of stark and uncompromising severity, with his high forehead and his fierce blue eyes, impeccably candid and pure, frowning slightly at the sight of human frailty, so that his mother, watching him guide his scissors neatly round the refrigerator, imagined him all red and ermine on the Bench or directing a stern and momentous enterprise in some crisis of public affairs.

But, said his father, stopping in front of the drawing-room window, it won't be fine.

Had there been an axe handy, a poker, or any weapon that would have gashed a hole in his father's breast and killed him, there and then, James would have seized it. Such were the extremes of emotion that Mr. Ramsay excited in his children's breasts by his mere presence; standing, as now, 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, who was ten thousand times better in every way than he was (James thought), but also with some secret conceit at his own accuracy of judgement. What he said was true. It was always true. He was incapable of untruth; never tampered with a fact; never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children, who, sprung from his loins, should be aware from childhood that life is difficult; facts uncompromising; and the passage to that fabled land where our brightest hopes are extinguished, our frail barks founder in darkness (here Mr. Ramsay would straighten his back and narrow his little blue eyes upon the horizon), one that needs, above all, courage, truth, and the power to endure.

But it may be fine, I expect it will be fine, said Mrs. Ramsay, making some little twist of the reddish brown stocking she was knitting, impatiently. If she finished it tonight, if they did go to the Lighthouse after all, it was to be given to the Lighthouse keeper for his little boy, who was threatened with a tuberculous hip; together with a pile of old magazines, and some tobacco, indeed, whatever she could find lying about, not really wanted, but only littering the room, to give those poor fellows, who must be bored to death sitting all day with nothing to do but polish the lamp and trim the wick and rake about on their scrap of garden, something to amuse them. For how would you like to be shut up for a whole month at a time, and possibly more in stormy weather, upon a rock the size of a tennis lawn? she would ask; and to have no letters or newspapers, and to see nobody; if you were married, not to see your wife, not to know how your children were, if they were ill, if they had fallen down and broken their legs or arms; to see the same dreary waves breaking week after week, and then a dreadful storm coming, and the windows covered with spray, and birds dashed against the lamp, and the whole place rocking, and not be able to put your nose out of doors for fear of being swept into the sea? How would you like that? she asked, addressing herself particularly to her daughters. So she added, rather differently, one must take them whatever comforts one can.

It's due west, said the atheist Tansley, holding his bony fingers spread so that the wind blew through them, for he was sharing Mr. Ramsay's evening walk up and down, up and down the terrace. That is to say, the wind blew from the worst possible direction for landing at the Lighthouse. Yes, he did say disagreeable things, Mrs. Ramsay admitted; it was odious of him to rub this in, and make James still more disappointed; but at the same time, she would not let them laugh at him. The atheist, they called him; the little atheist. Rose mocked him; Prue mocked him; Andrew, Jasper, Roger mocked him; even old Badger without a tooth in his head had bit him, for being (as Nancy put it) the hundred and tenth young man to chase them all the way up to the Hebrides when it was ever so much nicer to be alone.

Nonsense, said Mrs. Ramsay, with great severity. Apart from the habit of exaggeration which they had from her, and from the implication (which was true) that she asked too many people to stay, and had to lodge some in the town, she could not bear incivility to her guests, to young men in particular, who were poor as churchmice, exceptionally able, her husband said, his great admirers, and come there for a holiday. Indeed, she had the whole of the other sex under her protection; for reasons she could not explain, for their chivalry and valour, for the fact that they negotiated treaties, ruled India, controlled finance; finally for an attitude towards herself which no woman could fail to feel or to find agreeable, something trustful, childlike, reverential; which an old woman could take from a young man without loss of dignity, and woe betide the girl, pray Heaven it was none of her daughters! who did not feel the worth of it, and all that it implied, to the marrow of her bones!

She turned with severity upon Nancy. He had not chased them, she said. He had been asked.

They must find a way out of it all. There might be some simpler way, some less laborious way, she sighed. When she looked in the glass and saw her hair grey, her cheek sunk, at fifty, she thought, possibly she might have managed things better, her husband; money; his books. But for her own part she would never for a single second regret her decision, evade difficulties, or slur over duties. She was now formidable to behold, and it was only in silence, looking up from their plates, after she had spoken so severely about Charles Tansley, that her daughters, Prue, Nancy, Rose, could sport with infidel ideas which they had brewed for themselves of a life different from hers; in Paris, perhaps; a wilder life; not always taking care of some man or other; for there was in all their minds a mute questioning of deference and chivalry, of the Bank of England and the Indian Empire, of ringed fingers and lace, though to them all there was something in this of the essence of beauty, which called out the manliness in their girlish hearts, and made them, as they sat at table beneath their mother's eyes, honour her strange severity, her extreme courtesy, like a queen's raising from the mud to wash a beggar's dirty foot, when she admonished them so very severely about that wretched atheist who had chased them or, speaking accurately, been invited to stay with them in the Isle of Skye.

There'll be no landing at the Lighthouse tomorrow, said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough. She wished they would both leave her and James alone and go on talking. She looked at him. He was such a miserable specimen, the children said, all humps and hollows. He couldn't play cricket; he poked; he shuffled. He was a sarcastic brute, Andrew said. They knew what he liked best, to be for ever walking up and down, up and down, with Mr. Ramsay, and saying who had won this, who had won that, who was a first rate man at Latin verses, who was brilliant but I think fundamentally unsound, who was undoubtedly the ablest fellow in Balliol, who had buried his light temporarily at Bristol or Bedford, but was bound to be heard of later when his Prolegomena, of which Mr. Tansley had the first pages in proof with him if Mr. Ramsay would like to see them, to some branch of mathematics or philosophy saw the light of day. That was what they talked about.

She could not help laughing herself sometimes. She said, the other day, something about waves mountains high. Yes, said Charles Tansley, it was a little rough. Aren't you drenched to the skin? she had said. Damp, not wet through, said Mr. Tansley, pinching his sleeve, feeling his socks.

But it was not that they minded, the children said. It was not his face; it was not his manners. It was him, his point of view. When they talked about something interesting, people, music, history, anything, even said it was a fine evening so why not sit out of doors, then what they complained of about Charles Tansley was that until he had turned the whole thing round and made it somehow reflect himself and disparage them, he was not satisfied. And he would go to picture galleries they said, and he would ask one, did one like his tie? God knows, said Rose, one did not.

Disappearing as stealthily as stags from the dinner-table directly the meal was over, the eight sons and daughters of Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay sought their bedrooms, their fastness in a house where there was no other 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.

Strife, divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh, that they should begin so early, Mrs. Ramsay deplored. They were so critical, her children. They talked such nonsense. She went from the dining-room, holding James by the hand, since he would not go with the others. It seemed to her such nonsense, inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing-room window, are enough, quite enough. She had in mind at the moment, rich and poor, high and low; the great in birth receiving from her, half grudging, some respect, for had she not in her veins the blood of that very noble, if slightly mythical, Italian house, whose daughters, scattered about English drawing-rooms in the nineteenth century, had lisped so charmingly, had stormed so wildly, and all her wit and her bearing and her temper came from them, and not from the sluggish English, or the cold Scotch; but more profoundly, she ruminated the other problem, of rich and poor, and the things she saw with her own eyes, weekly, daily, here or in London, when she visited this widow, or that struggling wife in person with a bag on her arm, and a note-book and pencil with which she wrote down in columns carefully ruled for the purpose wages and spendings, employment and unemployment, in the hope that thus she would cease to be a private woman whose charity was half a sop to her own indignation, half a relief to her own curiosity, and become what with her untrained mind she greatly admired, an investigator, elucidating the social problem.

Insoluble questions they were, it seemed to her, standing there, holding James by the hand. He had followed her into the drawing-room, that young man they laughed at; he was standing by the table, fidgeting with something, awkwardly, feeling himself out of things, as she knew without looking round. They had all gone, the children; Minta Doyle and Paul Rayley; Augustus Carmichael; her husband, they had all gone. So she turned with a sigh and said, Would it bore you to come with me, Mr. Tansley?

She had a dull errand in the town; she had a letter or two to write; she would be ten minutes perhaps; she would put on her hat. And, with her basket and her parasol, there she was again, ten minutes later, giving out a sense of being ready, of being equipped for a jaunt, which, however, she must interrupt for a moment, as they passed the tennis lawn, to ask Mr. Carmichael, who was basking with his yellow cat's eyes ajar, so that like a cat's they seemed to reflect the branches moving or the clouds passing, but to give no inkling of any inner thoughts or emotion whatsoever, if he wanted anything.

For they were making the great expedition, she said, laughing. They were going to the town. Stamps, writing-paper, tobacco? she suggested, stopping by his side. But no, he wanted nothing. His hands clasped themselves over his capacious paunch, his eyes blinked, as if he would have liked to reply kindly to these blandishments (she was seductive but a little nervous) but could not, sunk as he was in a grey-green somnolence which embraced them all, without need of words, in a vast and benevolent lethargy of well-wishing; all the house; all the world; all the people in it, for he had slipped into his glass at lunch a few drops of something, which accounted, the children thought, for the vivid streak of canary-yellow in moustache and beard that were otherwise milk white. No, nothing, he murmured.

He should have been a great philosopher, said Mrs. Ramsay, as they went down the road to the fishing village, but he had made an unfortunate marriage. Holding her black parasol very erect, and moving with an indescribable air of expectation, as if she were going to meet some one round the corner, she told the story; an affair at Oxford with some girl; an early marriage; poverty; going to India; translating a little poetry very beautifully, I believe, being willing to teach the boys Persian or Hindustanee, but what really was the use of that? and then lying, as they saw him, on the lawn.

It flattered him; snubbed as he had been, it soothed him that Mrs. Ramsay should tell him this. Charles Tansley revived. Insinuating, too, as she did the greatness of man's intellect, even in its decay, the subjection of all wives not that she blamed the girl, and the marriage had been happy enough, she believed, to their husband's labours, she made him feel better pleased with himself than he had done yet, and he would have liked, had they taken a cab, for example, to have paid the fare. As for her little bag, might he not carry that? No, no, she said, she always carried THAT herself. She did too. Yes, he felt that in her. He felt many things, something in particular that excited him and disturbed him for reasons which he could not give. He would like her to see him, gowned and hooded, walking in a procession. A fellowship, a professorship, he felt capable of anything and saw himself but what was she looking at? At a man pasting a bill. The vast flapping sheet flattened itself out, and each shove of the brush revealed fresh legs, hoops, horses, glistening reds and blues, beautifully smooth, until half the wall was covered with the advertisement of a circus; a hundred horsemen, twenty performing seals, lions, tigers ... Craning forwards, for she was short-sighted, she read it out ... will visit this town, she read. It was terribly dangerous work for a one-armed man, she exclaimed, to stand on top of a ladder like that, his left arm had been cut off in a reaping machine two years ago.

Let us all go! she cried, moving on, as if all those riders and horses had filled her with childlike exultation and made her forget her pity.

Let's go, he said, repeating her words, clicking them out, however, with a self-consciousness that made her wince. Let us all go to the circus. No. He could not say it right. He could not feel it right. But why not? she wondered. What was wrong with him then? She liked him warmly, at the moment. Had they not been taken, she asked, to circuses when they were children? Never, he answered, as if she asked the very thing he wanted; had been longing all these days to say, how they did not go to circuses. It was a large family, nine brothers and sisters, and his father was a working man. My father is a chemist, Mrs. Ramsay. He keeps a shop. He himself had paid his own way since he was thirteen. Often he went without a greatcoat in winter. He could never return hospitality (those were his parched stiff words) at college. He had to make things last twice the time other people did; he smoked the cheapest tobacco; shag; the same the old men did in the quays. He worked hard, seven hours a day; his subject was now the influence of something upon somebody, they were walking on and Mrs. Ramsay did not quite catch the meaning, only the words, here and there ... dissertation ... fellowship ... readership ... lectureship. She could not follow the ugly academic jargon, that rattled itself off so glibly, but said to herself that she saw now why going to the circus had knocked him off his perch, poor little man, and why he came out, instantly, with all that about his father and mother and brothers and sisters, and she would see to it that they didn't laugh at him any more; she would tell Prue about it. What he would have liked, she supposed, would have been to say how he had gone not to the circus but to Ibsen with the Ramsays. He was an awful prig, oh yes, an insufferable bore. For, though they had reached the town now and were in the main street, with carts grinding past on the cobbles, still he went on talking, about settlements, and teaching, and working men, and helping our own class, and lectures, till she gathered that he had got back entire self-confidence, had recovered from the circus, and was about (and now again she liked him warmly) to tell her but here, the houses falling away on both sides, they came out on the quay, and the whole bay spread before them and Mrs. Ramsay could not help exclaiming, Oh, how beautiful! For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men.

That was the view, she said, stopping, growing greyer-eyed, that her husband loved.

She paused a moment. But now, she said, artists had come here. There indeed, only a few paces off, stood one of them, in Panama hat and yellow boots, seriously, softly, absorbedly, for all that he was watched by ten little boys, with an air of profound contentment on his round red face gazing, and then, when he had gazed, dipping; imbuing the tip of his brush in some soft mound of green or pink. Since Mr. Paunceforte had been there, three years before, all the pictures were like that, she said, green and grey, with lemon-coloured sailing-boats, and pink women on the beach.

But her grandmother's friends, she said, glancing discreetly as they passed, took the greatest pains; first they mixed their own colours, and then they ground them, and then they put damp cloths to keep them moist.

So Mr. Tansley supposed she meant him to see that that man's picture was skimpy, was that what one said? The

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