Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway

[soid]

 What a beautiful chain of interwind people's thoughts on a sunny summer day in London, stitched all together without breaks (ouch), puzzling and not telling enough, but showing a glimpse of people's most important bits of consciousness, mixed up memories and regrets of past decisions (and indecisions), weaving a sense of the current. I wish I was more attentive to what it says, but it is a rewarding read in any way.

and his eyes (as eyes tend to be), eyes merely; hazel, large; so that he was, on the whole, a border case, neither one thing nor the other, might end with a house at Purley and a motor car, or continue renting apartments in back streets all his life; one of those half-educated, self-educated men whose education is all learnt from books borrowed from public libraries, read in the evening after the day’s work, on the advice of well-known authors consulted by letter.

There are many layers, of course, but the entire book is moving in anticipation of Clarissa and Peter meeting and talking it through – and then it ends, without a word. Why didn't they marry when they were young? It is all there, in the beginning, of course. And Richard, what's his purpose? He seemed sacrificed his career by marrying Clarissa ("It might have been better if Richard had married a woman with less charm, who would have helped him more in his work. He had lost his chance of the Cabinet"). Maybe he was not smart enough for the Cabinet. 

So she [Mrs Dalloway] would still find herself arguing in St. James’s Park, still making out that she had been right—and she had too—not to marry him [Peter]. For in marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in day out in the same house; which Richard gave her, and she him. (Where was he this morning for instance? Some committee, she never asked what.) But with Peter everything had to be shared; everything gone into. And it was intolerable, and when it came to that scene in the little garden by the fountain, she had to break with him or they would have been destroyed, both of them ruined, she was convinced; though she had borne about with her for years like an arrow sticking in her heart the grief, the anguish; and then the horror of the moment when some one told her at a concert that he had married a woman met on the boat going to India! Never should she forget all that! Cold, heartless, a prude, he called her. Never could she understand how he cared. ... For he was quite happy, he assured her—perfectly happy, though he had never done a thing that they talked of; his whole life had been a failure. It made her angry still.

Life and death, and no language of love and happiness – only this interesting clarity in confusion with life, without repeating the pattern (misleading anyway), perhaps, that is how we should attempt to think of our lives; clarity is overvalued trait of totalitarian thought; ambiguity is the weapon of the slave?

Still the future of civilisation lies, he thought, in the hands of young men like that; of young men such as he was, thirty years ago; with their love of abstract principles; getting books sent out to them all the way from London to a peak in the Himalayas; reading science; reading philosophy. The future lies in the hands of young men like that, he thought.

Comments

[juan_gandhi]

Thank you. I feel like I must read it.