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ysobelle[Mr. Ramsay, stumbling along a passage one dark morning, stretched his arms out, but Mrs. Ramsay having died rather suddenly the night before, his arms, though stretched out, remained empty.]
How stark. How plain. And how unbearably painful.
I remember reading To The Lighthouse in high school, many years ago, and thinking how I was probably never going to be a big Virginia Woolf fan. But I could never forget that I got through the novel grumbling up to that point, read that passage, and began to sob uncontrollably. Being older and somewhat-- I say somewhat-- less dramatic now, I just cried the least bit, sitting at lunch in a deli, and spent the next half an hour in a lit-induced daze.
If Jane Austen wrote on a "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory,"* Viginia Woolf wrote on a pinhead.
*Austen once said of her writing that it was "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as to produce little effect, after much labour."
How stark. How plain. And how unbearably painful.
I remember reading To The Lighthouse in high school, many years ago, and thinking how I was probably never going to be a big Virginia Woolf fan. But I could never forget that I got through the novel grumbling up to that point, read that passage, and began to sob uncontrollably. Being older and somewhat-- I say somewhat-- less dramatic now, I just cried the least bit, sitting at lunch in a deli, and spent the next half an hour in a lit-induced daze.
If Jane Austen wrote on a "little bit (two inches wide) of ivory,"* Viginia Woolf wrote on a pinhead.
*Austen once said of her writing that it was "the little bit (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush, as to produce little effect, after much labour."