What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years.
Sometimes she had it; sometimes not. She never knew why it came or why it went, or if she had it until she came into the room and then she knew instantly by the way some man looked at her.
He shared out the parcels – there were a number of them, ill tied, in brown paper.
And of course she enjoyed life immensely. It was her nature to enjoy. Anyhow there was not bitterness in her; none of that sense of moral virtue which is so repulsive in good women. She enjoyed practically everything. If you walked with her in Hyde Park now it was a bed of tulips, now a child in a perambulator, now some absurd little drama she made up on the spur of the moment.
There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that.
They both felt uncomfortable, as if they did not know whether to go on or go back.
The only advise, indeed, that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts, to use your own reason, to come to your own conclusions. If this is agreed between us, then I fell at liberty to put forward a few ideas and suggestions because you will not allow them to fatter that independence which is the most important quality that a reader can posses.
Intellectual freedom depends upon material things. Poetry depends upon intellectual freedom. And women have always been poor, not for two hundred years merely, but from the beginning of time. Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves. Women, then, have not had a dog’s chance of writing poetry. That is why I have laid so much stress on money and a room of one’s own.
It is only when we look at the past and take from it the element of uncertainty that we can enjoy perfect peace.
I keep my phrases hung like clothes in a cupboard, waiting for someone to wear them.
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.
There’ll be no landing at the Lighthouse to-morrow,” said Charles Tansley, clapping his hands together as he stood at the window with her husband. Surely, he had said enough.
Nothing exists outside us except a state of mind, he thinks; a desire for solace, for relief, for something outside these miserable pigmies, these feeble, these ugly, these craven men and women.
2 “No going to the Lighthouse, James,” he said, as he stood by the window, speaking awkwardly, but trying in deference to Mrs. Ramsay to soften his voice into some semblance of geniality at least. Odious little man, thought Mrs. Ramsay, why go on saying that?
Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.
She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?
He did not blame her; he blamed nothing, nobody; he saw the truth. He saw the dun-colored race of waters and the blank shore. But life is vigorous; the body lives, and the body, no doubt, dictated the reflection, which now urged him to movement, that one may cast away the forms of human beings, and yet retain the passion which seemed inseparable from their existence in the flesh.
But here, none too soon, are the second-hand bookshops. Here we find anchorage in these thwarting currents of being; here we balance ourselves after the splendours and miseries of the streets.
Nothing should be named lest by doing so we change it. Let it exist, this bank, this beauty, and I, for one instant, steeped in pleasure.
So that to know her, or any one, one must seek out the people who completed them; even the places.