Among the many problems which beset the novelist, not the least weighty is the choice of the moment at which to begin his novel.
He was a foolish cynic who said that great love occurred only two or three times in a century. There is nothing more lovely in life than the union of two people whose love for one another has grown through the years from the small acorn of passion into a great rooted tree. Surviving all vicissitudes, and rich with its manifold branches, every leaf holding its own significance.
Only it won’t be an earthquake – not in England, England isn’t seismic – it will be a gradual crumbling.
Please, in all this muddle of life, continue to be a bright and constant star. Just a few things remain as beacons: poetry, and you, and solitude.
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone. I just miss you...
Someday I’ll write and tell you all the things you mean to me in my mind. Shall I?
I wish, in a way, that we could put the clock back a year. I should like to startle you again, – even though I didn’t know then that you were startled.
I am absolutely devoted to her, but not in love. So there.
Youth had no beauty like the beauty of an old face; the face of youth was an unwritten page.
Her body had, in fact, become her companion, a constant resource and preoccupation; all the small squalors of the body, known only to oneself, insignificant in youth, easily dismissed, in old age became dominant and entered into fulfilment of the tyranny they had always threatened. Yet it was, rather than otherwise, an agreeable and interesting tyranny.
My bed’s at least nine foot wide, and I feel like the Princes and the Pea, – only there is no Pea. It is a four-poster, all of which I like. Come and see for yourself.
But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.
Chances of meeting this person, doing that thing, accumulate. Life is as I’ve said since I was ten, awfully interesting – if anything, quicker, keener at forty-four than twenty-four – more desperate I suppose, as the river shoots to Niagara – my new vision of death. ‘The one experience I shall never describe’ I said to Vita yesterday.
You see it is so easy for you sitting in Tavistock Square to look inward; but I find it very difficult to look inward when I am also looking at the coast of Sinai; and very difficult to look at the coast of Sinai when I am also looking inward and finding the image of Virginia everywhere.
Dined with Virginia at Richmond. She is as delicious as ever.
Clive with his tongue well-loosened, imagine my horror when he suddenly said, ‘I wonder if I dare ask Vita a very indiscreet question?’ and I, being innocent and off my guard, said yes he might, and he came out with ‘Have you ever gone to bed with Virginia?’ but I think my ‘NEVER!’ convinced him and everybody else of the truth. This will show you what the conversation was like!
Lunched with Virginia in Tavistock Square, where she has just arrived. The first time that I have been alone with her for long. Went on to see Mama, my head swimming with Virginia.
I find life altogether intoxicating, – its pain no less than its pleasure, – in which Virginia plays no mean part.
According to his lights, he gave you all you could desire. He merely killed you, that’s all. Men do kill women. Most women enjoy being killed; so I am told. Being a woman, I daresay that even you took a certain pleasure in the process.
I have discovered my true function in life: I am a snob.
Suddenly the word instinct leaves me.