To the Lighthouse by
Virginia Woolf
My rating:
5 of 5 stars
First of all, this will contain spoilers. Second of all, my rating is still under debate. This is a solid 5 stars for the way it was written, but as far the the specific content and message go, I'm still analyzing. Scratch that, this book was mind-bendingly awesome, and one that needs to be thoroughly chewed and digested before you can ever really "finish" it. I love many, many things about this book, while I was simultaneously infuriated by it in the process of reading it. This is a book, and indeed, an author, who says "Forget you, plot lines and all other traditional facets of any novel, I do what I want!" All the "big" events (birth, marriage, death, etc) are reported in brackets. As though each death were merely a parenthetical note compared to the details of each character's thoughts and consciousness. This was amazing to read and discover. And I just can't get over the potential life messages buried within the methods and style rather than plot events. My gosh, it like she is challenging her readers to read her prose novel as though it were poetry. I came to love how this entire book is dedicated to character development through their inner thoughts, rather than their immediate, surface response to a string of dramatic situations. This seems like a powerful way to question how we traditionally view all life stories, including our own. From reading most books it would seem that we humans are convinced that life is succession of external stimuli and our lives and beings are just reactions to these. But are we not more than just our actions? Are not our thoughts the very core of our individual selves? Life is so much more than Jane Austen's "quick succession of busy nothings"! It is the sum total of our thoughts, our actions, and our interactions/our relationships. Most books could be summarized as "this happened, then that happened", but this book cannot be. This book is snapshot of each character's consciousness, so much so that it begs the questions; Why aren't more books like this? Why aren't more books actual attempts to capture a human mind on paper? Why are we obsessed with reading random, made-up strings of events, but struggle to value other's thought processes?
I loved reading the commentaries on marriage, both Lily's aversion to it (page 117) and Mrs. Ramsey's more positive experiences with it (pages, 68-9, 79) Especially all the things that spouses don't say to each other, and more broadly "the obscurity of {all} human relationships" (page 195).
I can't get over the way Woolf transitions. Or actually, they way she doesn't. Her "transitions" from the thoughts of one character to another are so seamless, yet strange, confusing, yet natural, that I sit wondering if that even was a transition of any kind and oh snap, who's thinking now? (E.g. page 136) Ultimately, this book was intellectually challenging in the best way, like a really frustrating work-out where you want to punch the instructor in the face the entire time, but when you finish, you walk away feeling so amazingly empowered by your accomplishment like, "Heck yeah, take that Shaun T; I just mastered your Insanity workout, what now?! Whose quads are too big now?"
(PS, as far as page numbering goes, I read the Everyman's Library edition, and many of my thoughts are based on post-its I scribbled to myself while reading)
Woolf seemed to be very focused on Mr. Ramsey wanting to protect his wife, but not feeling that it was even possible, for most of the first volume. And then after pages and pages of this feeling, Mrs.Ramsey does in fact die before him. This and many other instances seem to point to the overwhelmingly lonely and therefore sad existence that all humans seemed doomed to live because one can never fully convey one's thoughts, nor really enter the mind of another, and without doing so how can we ever know even one single other person?
While reading sections 3 and 4 of volume 3, pages 171-179:
Lily's thoughts so amazingly portrayed, How the mind really thinks, captured here, especially how one wanders from topic to topic, never really leaving one behind entirely. How many things are thought simultaneously and how difficult it is to truly "write one's thoughts". I love how lily agonizes over how to express her sympathy to Mr. Ramsey until she pinpoints the exact moment in the conversation when she has missed her chance to do so. I love how, even though on paper one's thoughts seem jumbled and unrelated/disconnected, really each topic that comes to mind is related and relevant to you in that moment, and at any time one;s present physical surroundings can bud into our inner thoughts. For we always have at least two trains of thought going at any given moment: (1) our physical surroundings and (2) our inner thoughts. Often there are more layers than that so how could an author even hope to accurately portray even one human mind? And yet, Virginia Woolf comes closer than any other author I've ever read, including my own journal. I've never relished anything so metaphysical before, ooooh, how I love it!
Favorite quotes/moments:
Volume 3, section 6, page 195, on silence and communication
"Mrs Ramsey sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative: to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren't things spoilt then...by saying them? Aren't we more expressive thus?"
Volume 3, section 12, page 222, Lily
"But this was one way of knowing people, she thought: to know the outline, not the detail."
Volume 1, section 16, page 90
"Mrs. Ramsey felt, very irrationally, except that after all holocaust on such a scale was not probable. They could not all be drowned. And again she felt alone in the presence of her old antagonist, life."
Volume 1, section 17, page 119, Mrs. Ramsey on the widower who she thinks cares for her maybe,
"He was not 'in love' of course; it was one of those unclassified affections of which there are so many."
Volume 1, section 17, page 127 (final paragraph before chpt 18) Mrs. Ramsey's thoughts:
"It was necessary now to carry everything a step further. 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"
Volume 1, section 19, pg 138, Mr Ramsey
"The whole of life did not consist of going to bed with a woman, he thought, returning to Scott and Balzac, to the English novel and the French novel.
Voume 1, section 10, page 68-9, Mrs Ramsey's thoughts
Was she wrong in this, she asked herself, reviewing her conduct for the past week or two, and wondering if she had indeed put any pressure upon Minta, who was only twenty-four, to make up her mind. She was uneasy. Had she not laughed about it? Was she not forgetting again how strongly she influenced people? Marriage needed- oh all sorts of qualities (the bill for the greenhouse would be fifty pounds); one-she need not name it-
that was essential; the thing she had with her husband. Had they that?"
Volume 1, section 19, page 136
"And all the lives we ever lived
And all the lives to be,
Are full of trees and changing leaves..."
Volume 1, section 19, page 136
"She read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her-her husband slapping his thighs."
Volume 1, section 6, page 40
"And his fame lasts how long? It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr. Ramsey ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from mountain-top down the long wastes of ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare"
Volume 1, section 1, page 11-12, sentence length and structure
"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."
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Babies sure do change quickly; Walter is now 7.5 months old, about 20 lbs, and almost 27 inches long! He has two teeth and can army crawl surprisingly fast. The teeth and crawling all happened in the same week, so you can bet that was a fun one. He's also now met most of his extended family! From my dad's sibling reunion in Arizona, to a trip to SLC for Ryan's work, and to Virginia for my friend's wedding, we had a whirlwind end to our summer. His first plane ride went rather well (especially when compared to his first cross-country car ride). He's a good eater (assuming you mean milk not veggies) and a poor sleeper, but look at those chubby cheeks!
