Oh, yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.
Don’t you know that our belief in man’s intellect is the greatest fallacy of them all?
Haven’t we bred them and fed and kept them in comfort since the beginning of time so that they may be clever even if they’re nothing else? It’s all our doing!
Aren’t they one’s past, all that remains of it, those men and women, those ghosts lying under the trees,... one’s happiness, one’s reality?
She must go back to them. But what an extraordinary night! She felt somehow very like him – the young man who killed himself. She felt glad that he had done it; thrown it away while they went on living. The clock was striking. The leaden circles dissolved in the air. But she must go back. She must assemble. She must find Sally and Peter. And she came in from the little room.
Every one gives up something when they marry.
Down there among the roots where the flowers decayed, gusts of dead smells were wafted; drops formed on the bloated sides of swollen things. The skin of rotten fruit broke, and matter oozed too thick to run.
Now glancing this side, that side, they looked deeper, beneath the flowers, down the dark avenues into the unlit world where the leaf rots and the flower has fallen.
Far away a bell tolls, but not for death. There are bells that ring for life. A leaf falls, from joy. Oh, I am in love with life!
She was haunted by the ghosts of phrases. She gave herself up to a sensual delight in the combinations of words. She sought them in the pages of her favorite authors.
Hence, perhaps, the peculiar nature of woman in fiction; the astonishing extremes of her beauty and horror; her alterations between heavenly goodness and hellish depravity – for so a lover would see her as his love rose and sank, was prosperous or unhappy.
As a child he had walked in Regent’s Park – odd, he thought, hope the thought of childhood keeps coming back to me – the result of seeing Clarissa, perhaps; for women live much more in the past than we do, he thought. They attach themselves to places: and their fathers – a woman’s always proud of her father.
All mists curl off the roof of my being.
She had a perfectly clear notion of what she wanted. Her emotions were all on the surface. Beneath, she was very shrewd – a far better judge of character than Sally, for instance, and with it all, purely feminine; with that extraordinary gift, that woman’s gift, of making a world of her own wherever she happened to be.
Here she took up her lodging and began instantly to look about her for what she had come in search of–that is to say, life and a lover.
So the room was an attic; the bed narrow; and lying there reading, for she slept badly, she could not dispel a virginity preserved through childbirth which clung to her like a sheet. Lovely in girlhood, suddenly there came a moment...
This was now revealed to Septimus; the message hidden in the beauty of words. The secret signal which one generation passes, under disguise, to the next is loathing, hatred, despair.
There was a bill that he would pay with a real two shilling piece, and it was real, all real, he assured himself, fingering the coin in his pocket, real to everyone except to him and to her; even to him it began to seem real; and then–but it was too exciting to stand and think any longer, and he pulled the parasol out of the earth with a jerk and was impatient to find the place where one had tea with other people, like other people.
You can judge of our simplicity when I tell you that before parting that night we agreed that the objects of life were to produce good people and good books. Our questions were directed to finding out how far these objects were attained by men. We vowed solemnly that we would not bear a single child until we were satisfied.
Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace. And so he sank into a quiet mood, under the oak tree, the hardness of whose roots, exposed above the ground seemed to him rather comfortable than otherwise.
That she had grown older? Would he say that, or would she see him thinking when he came back, that she had grown older?