It’s Virginia Woolf’s 136th birthday, meaning she’s had plenty of time to finish her description of the child orbiting the lake by foot and how it brings to mind the circular nature of life. After all, the kid made it just five steps, and it was a century ago.
The English author’s To the Lighthouse is one of my favorite novels, and certainly my top choice among the dozens of modernist works I started and backed away from by page or—if we’re weighing Ezra Pound—verse 50. Narrative was optional in this genre of the abstruse and indulgent, written for an audience of Turing machines majoring in lit as often as it was for humans. Lighthouse is plenty dense and philosophical. But it’s absorbing and moving, too: Much of its imagery has a sense of time and place (it chronicles a World War I-era family visiting the Isle of Skye), and Woolf drifts from metaphor to reality, sometimes in the same thought, bulking up her clever references with emotional meaning.
One of the best examples of this is her portrait of Mr. Ramsay, a regarded metaphysicist—a hat-tip to the themes of the book—who worries he never will advance further than the brink of greatness. A central character and patriarch of the family, his self-doubt provokes moodiness, harshness, which his dutiful wife constantly balances. He’s hardly sympathetic even in the context of his professional strain—and especially not through a modern interpretation of gender roles. (Mrs. Ramsay exists wholly as his support structure; it’s not mutual.) In fact, he’s quite pitiful. But the way Woolf describes it is compelling. And the quality of the writing is extraordinary.
In one passage, she tells of his reflection on mortality and his place in history. It begins by likening the spectrum of genius to the alphabet: “For if thought is like the keyboard of a piano, divided into so many notes, or like the alphabet is ranged in twenty-six letters all in order, then his splendid mind had no sort of difficulty in running over those letters one by one, firmly and accurately, until it had reached, say, the letter Q. He reached Q. Very few people in the whole of England ever reach Q.” Mr. Ramsay’s goal—which is also the tragedy of his limitations, as he sees it—is to reach R. And in thinking about the challenge, the story, like Mr. Ramsay’s addled brain, wanders between image and reality.
“Feelings that would not have disgraced a leader who, now that the snow has begun to fall and the mountain-top is covered in mist, knows that he must lay himself down and die before morning comes, stole upon him, paling the colour of his eyes, giving him, even in the two minutes of his turn on the terrace, the bleached look of withered old age. Yet he would not die lying down; he would find some crag of rock, and there, his eyes fixed on the storm, trying to the end to pierce the darkness, he would die standing. He would never reach R. He stood stock still by the urn, with the geranium flowing over it. How many men in a thousand million, he asked himself, reach Z after all? … ‘One perhaps.’ One in a generation. Is he to be blamed then if he is not that one?”
This is so much of the book: still in time, and all over the place in thought. The reader can understand the intensity of the self-criticism all but vicariously—almost like Woolf, a Z, had been there herself and knew how to tell of it.
“It is permissible even for a hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter,” she continues. “His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages?”
Then comes a classic line: “The very stone one kicks with one’s boot will outlast Shakespeare.” Read as a piece of Stoic philosophy, it’s a way to say: “Get over yourself.”
The passage culminates cleverly with another Shakespeare reference (Macbeth), and a paragraph I marked in lowercase, “this is one of my favorite sentences ever”: partly for the writing, and partly for the reminder never to behave like this. “Finally, who shall blame the leader of the doomed expedition, if, having adventured to the uttermost, and used his strength wholly to the last ounce and fallen asleep not much caring if he wakes or not, he now perceives by some pricking in his toes that he lives, and does not on the whole object to live, but requires sympathy, and whisky, and someone to tell the story of his suffering to at once? Who shall blame him?” Certainly no one who can identify with the narcissism of the 21st century.
