The Strangeness of Words

Proust’s Search is as much a philosophical novel as The Magic Mountain, yet it is a more satisfying work of art. Angelo Caranfa, in Proust, The Creative Silence, explores Proust’s marriage of philosophy and art.

A central question regarding the artistic symbolization in Marcel Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu is the relationship between its metaphoric expressions and the phenomenal world to which these metaphors refer. Stated differently, the question becomes: what is the relationship between artistic creation and philosophic discourse? Artistic forms derive their power and significance from multiple levels of meaning and layers of symbols within which artists embed their vision of reality. Philosophic discourse, on the other hand, derives its power from the philosopher’s ability to isolate ideas and to express them clearly through language.
As a metaphoric expression of Proust’s vision of reality, the novel is indeed a work of art. At the same time, it embodies a philosophic inquiry into the nature of language. Whether philosophical or metaphorical, therefore, language is the expression of thought. Proust says:

‘So it is with all great writers: the beauty of their sentences is as unforeseeable as is that of a woman whom we have never seen; it is creative, because it is applied to an external object which they have thought of–as opposed to thinking about themselves–and to which they have not yet given expression.’ (II,170)

The beauty of the written word is ‘imprévisible‘ [unforeseeable] because for every given thought there is no formulable essence, no permanent speech, no objective idea for expressing reality; speech must be creative because  it must be changeable and flexible, always defining and redefining external objects. According to Proust, literary discourse is related to the phenomenal world as beauty is to an object that has never been seen and, ultimately, to an imaginary reality. (21)

The narrator recalls how as a youth he sometimes had difficulty understanding Bergotte’s speech. The reason for the strangeness of the words to his ears gets at the root of “the relationship between words and ideas they represent”. (23)

Moreover the quality, always rare and new, of what he wrote was expressed in his conversation by so subtle a manner of approaching a question, ignoring every aspect of it that was already familiar, that he appeared to be seizing hold of an unimportant detail, to be off the point, to be indulging in paradox, so that his ideas seemed as often as not to be confused, for each of us sees clarity only in those ideas which have the same degree of confusion as his own. Besides, as all novelty depends upon the prior elimination of the stereotyped attitude to which we had grown accustomed, and which seemed to us to be reality itself, any new form of conversation, like all original painting and music, must always appear complicated and exhausting.’ (II,171) [The core trait of modernity. JE]

The ‘conversation nueve,’ which employs figures of speech, , cannot be separated from the ideas, the images of things. Bergotte, the great writer, can only use reality, or phenomena, to expose the images, and he expresses them with metaphors because they give that unforeseeable quality, that plastic element to his words, which thereby allows him to preserve images in their ‘milieu vital and at the same time create new forms of discourse by which he soars above the stereotyped ideas of reality in which habitual or ordinary language is confined. Therefore, the word emerging from the thought of the great writer is at first confusing and exhausting to listeners because the latter are closed off to themselves in the familiar usage of words; they fail to see the image behind the words, the same images that constitute the writer’s self-awareness and this ‘conversation nueve’ of literary discourse verbalizes. Thus, to the extent that reality itself cannot be expressed except in metaphors (which are themselves real), even philosophic language must assume the same speech forms as literary discourse. (24-25)

What is the source material from which we create metaphors? It can be from reflective thought or it can be from memory. Memory has the stronger claim.

Those words that derive from memory, on the other hand, are the images that express the self’s creative power and artistic genius–provided that they are perceived as having a standard of truth, a verifiable point of reference in the idea of things. And the words that make visible ‘an image on which one cannot retrospectively impose an interpretation that is not subject to verification and objective sanction’ are not susceptible to modification and therefore are verifiable only by the self’s own memory, thoughts, and speech forms. Conceived this way, a word is a remembrance of things past on which a stream of images flows from the self’s own thought, articulating the idea, the form of things. Throught words, then, ideas come streaming back, one image after another, unfolding reality, which is infinitely more rich and more profound yet narrower than thought itself or the mind. (26)

Thus the importance, I believe, of unforced memories.

…for memory is the outward projection of the past (archaic images) and the means by which the hidden and the impenetrable reserve (essence, form) is made visible and transparent. It is the tool by which lost images of places, objects, and people we have known are recaptured….This is so because it would become clear to them that what they know is not the stars, sky, atmosphere, earth, objects, events, people, and words but only what their own ears hear, their own eyes see, their own words express, their own minds imagine, their own memories inspire, and their own thoughts create. (28)

Created by a Human Being

To write about Proust’s aesthetics is necessarily to contradict Proust’s intentions. For him, art begins where rational explanation ends. Nattiez is aware of the risk. In this passage, for instance, he provides an insightful analysis of the importance of music in Search:

The philosophy of Schopenhauer is not an apology for suicide. Renunciation of the Will-to-Live means that exceptional beings–geniuses and saints–devote themselves to pure contemplation. The musician is the supreme contemplative, for when music does not debase itself in pictorial description it is ‘a direct copy of the will itself.’

Is not the joy of the Veda also the joyous call to creation that the Narrator hears at the beginning and at the end of the Septet? Yes indeed, it was Schopenhauer who wrote the Vinteuil Sonata, right down to the last detail: ‘The composer reveals the innermost  nature of the world, and expresses the profoundest wisdom in a language that his reasoning faculty does not understand, just as a magnetic somnambulist gives information about things of which she has no conception when she is awake. Therefore in the composer, more than in any other  artist, the man is entirely separate and distinct from the artist.’ Herein reside Swann’s false trails: rational explanation, biographical explanation. We should also recall the Narrator’s speculation about a phrase in the Septet: ‘Perhaps…it had been inspired in Vinteuil by his daughter’s sleep.’ (83)

But Nattiez recognizes the inherent contradiction in writing about what cannot be written about.

In trying to show what the Sonata and Septet of Vinteuil owe to Schopenhauer, I have obviously gone against Proust’s intentions. If A la recherche itself is to be a redemptive work in the image of Parsifal or the Septet, it needs to escape from Time and become a pure object of philosophical, literary and aesthetic contemplation; the novel must free itself from its epoch and its author. It was not for nothing that Proust asked Céleste to burn his rough drafts, and there can be no doubt he would have done the same with all his notebooks and jotters if only he had time to experience the feeling that his work was finally complete. In all creative artists obsessed with the absolute…we find the same Utopian effort to efface the poietic dimension. It is Utopian, in the first place, because, as Proust shows very clearly with respect to Wagner, even of itself the text of a writer or composer will always bear traces–whether he likes it or not, and to a greater or lesser degree–of the labour that brought it into existence. It is Utopian, secondly, because the creative artist cannot obliterate all traces of his activity. If he destroys his rough drafts and sketches, his contemporaries will describe them. Even if he kills his contemporaries, that will not prevent the critic from comparing his texts and establishing connections (as I have done in this book). And it is Utopian, in the final analysis, because while all the metaphysicians in the world may say what they like about the Essence or the Idea being outside time, the books that deal with it or the works that are supposed to apprehend or translate it will always have been created by a human being, in  a given period, in a specific context. (88)

Oceanic Feelings

Nattiez reflects on Swann’s progressive understandings as he re-discovers the Vinteuil sonata. They come in two waves.

On the one hand, the qualities peculiar to the sonorous material which lead him to speak of ‘purely musical impressions’: the violin line is ‘slender’, ‘robust’, ‘compact’ and ‘commanding’; the mass of the piano part ‘multiform’, ‘indivisible’, ‘smooth’ yet ‘restless’; the music evokes arabesques and surfaces of varied dimensions. At the beginning the sensations are of the order of ‘breadth’, ‘tenuity’, ‘stability’ or ‘capricousness’. Then, when perception becomes more precise, Proust introduces more objective judgements, such as ‘symmetrical arrangement’ and ‘notation’. As for the little phrase, we are told that it is ‘secret’, murmuring, detached,…airy and perfumed…dancing, pastoral, interpolated, episodic’. We thus have an abundance of concrete observations, corresponding to the first impressions of a Swann literally submerged.

For – and this is the second aspect of the evocation – mixed up with these purely musical impressions, in a ‘deep blue’ and iridescent’ atmosphere, we find observations which are indeed descriptive but the same time rather vague, relating to the wold of the sea: ‘the mass of the piano-part beginning to emerge in a sort of liquid rippling of sound’ evokes ‘the deep blue tumult of the sea, silvered and charmed into a minor key by the moonlight’. The words ‘submersion’, ‘liquidity’, ‘emerge’, ‘plunge’, ‘tumult of the waves’ should also be noted; and the phrase is located ‘above the waves of sound.’

Why this atmosphere of the sea? By way of preparation, no doubt, for the first movement of the Septet, in The Captive, but also because the sea is indissolubly bound up in Proust’s mental geography with the emergence of woman: one has only to think of the girls on the sea-front at Balbec. The little phrase will soon be associated with an unknown woman, then more specifically with Odette. (Nattiez, 41-42)

I am not entirely convinced of this last statement. While true enough, it lacks psychological force. Proust would object, but some biographical background fills out the connection between music and sea.

Proust and Reynaldo Hahn spent the summer of 1895 in and around Brittany, ending with a stay near the village of Beg Meil. Proust turned twenty-four that July and Hahn twenty-one in August. Proust was feeling in good health and the two of them, along with the American painter T. Alexander Harrison, made frequent walks to the beach to view the sunsets over the ocean (read William C. Carter’s Proust in Love for a full account). Earlier in the summer they had met Camille Saint-Saëns and it was at Beg Meil that Proust and Hahn became entranced with his Sonata I for piano and violin, opus 75. Proust would ask Hahn to play the opening movement over and over and it became emblematic of their love for each other. And it became, of course, the model for Vinteuil’s “little phrase.” Here is Proust retelling this time in his first novel (unpublished in his lifetime), Jean Santeuil.

He had recognized that phrase from the Saint-Saëns Sonata which almost every eventing in the heyday of their happiness he had asked for, and she had played endlessly to him, ten times, twenty times, over, making him sit quite close to her so that she could embrace him while she played….Far from her now and all alone, having had  this evening not so much as a single kiss, and not daring to ask for one, he listened to the phrase wich when they were happy, had seemed to greet them with a smile from heaven, but now had lost its power to enchant. (quoted in Carter, 45)

It seems to me it is the combination of seaside setting and the powerful impact of this music on his love affair with Hahn that is the true source of Proust’s oceanic metaphors to describe the music.

Hume and Bondage

I don’t know how familiar Proust was with Hume, but he certainly shares his view that the intellect without the desires is nothing.  http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/of-hume-and-bondage/?hp

Enigmatic Façade

I believe much of the narrative power of Proust’s prose arises from his decision to tell an autobiographical tale that, even though the narrator is in effect omniscient, he lets us learn at just the same rate as Marcel, his younger self, does. Richard L. Kopp, in Marcel Proust as Social Critic, shares this view but bases it on his interpretation of the central psychological insight of the narrator, that we are fundamentally alone, cannot know the other person, can only observe and interpret. This raises Marcel’s observations as the primary vehicle for his understanding of and subsequent disillusionment with society.

Why has Proust changed from the traditional form to what was then a relatively unfamiliar novel form to tell what is basically the same story as that found in Jean Santeuil?

The answer to this question of the change of person is related Proust’s belief that in life, i.e., in society, each individual is a completely independent entity with no means of communication with others. What is Basin like when he is not playing the role of Duc de Guermantes? We can ask this question of any character in society and the answer will always be that we do not and cannot know. Each individual in society presents an enigmatic façade which is usually called “personality.” (60)

Proust’s concept of a narrator to tell all the action is the logical outcome of his conviction that we cannot know the inner workings of the mind unless the individual makes it possible. In order to observe society, Proust says it is necessary to be in the position of an outsider: “Pour la découverte esthétique des réalités, if faut se mettre  en dehors d’elles..” (Proust Notebooks). His narrator says his book will be a kind of magnifying glass through which the reader will see all of life more clearly: “The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived in himself.” (Time Regained, 322). (63)

Within the social structure he has created, Proust places his narrator in a position from which all the characters and their characteristics can be observed. The narrator finds himself in the enviable situation of being welcomed into salons where members do not easily move from one social level to another. In this way he is able to observe any social level from the inside even though he himself may remain an outsider to a particular social situation. But by his emphasis on observation of people and events, it can be said that the narrator is always an outsider. And it is from the vantage point of exterior observation that he is able to gather facts and make objective judgments. (65)

Kopp gives numerous examples of learning by observation; here is one:

When, one evening, he goes to visit the Guermantes with the secret desire of learning the validity of a dinner invitation, the narrator finds himself a witness to several scenes which he will use to judge his aristocratic hosts: the duke’s machinations to avoid knowing the seriousness of his cousin’s illness, an instance of the duchesse’s dislike of making people happy, and the lack of feeling with which they receive Swann’s announcement that he is dying. He never does learn whether the invitation was really from the princess, but he learns quite a bit about life in high society by that brief visit. and after the dinner is over he is again, conveniently, in their company when the duke is informed that his cousin is indeed dead. At this moment he has the opportunity to witness the duke’s reaction to the fait accompli; Swann, after all, could have been misled by the doctors: “Ce sont des anes.” But the narrator sees that the duke’s reaction is, paradoxically, the same. (Guermantes Way, 786-819)

Parsifal II

Jean-Jacques Nattiez, in his Proust as Musician, write about how Wagner and Parsifal, in particular, influenced Search. He quotes from the “Parsifal panel,” a passage that Proust edited out of Time Regained, perhaps because he wanted a stronger focus on literary art. The scene is the Guermantes library, where Marcel is awaiting the end of the concert, a movement from Parsifal, before joining the guests.

Some of these truths themselves are perfectly supernatural beings whom we have never seen, but whom we recognise with infinite pleasure when a great artist succeeds in bringing them from that divine world to which he has access so that they may come to shine for a moment above our own. Was not this motif of the “Good Friday Spell’, which (doubtless through a door of the great salon left half-open because of the heat) reached me just a moment ago, providing support for my idea if indeed it had not just suggested it–was it not one of these beings, not belonging to any of the species of reality, or to any of the realms of nature, that we might conceive? With his violin bow Wagner seems to content himself with discovering this being, rendering it visible like a faded picture newly restored, revealing all its contours with the prudent and tender assurance of instruments that follow their track, now changing subtly to indicate a shadow, now marking more boldly the greater brilliance where, just for a moment before disappearing, the vision reaches–that scrupulously respected vision to which they would not have been able to add one single feature without our having felt that Wagner was embellishing, lying, ceasing to see and concealing its fading with fragments of his own invention. What exactly was its clear relationship to the first awakening of spring? Who could have said?It was still there, like an iridescent bubble that had not yet burst, like a rainbow that had faded for a moment only to begin shining again with a livelier brilliance, adding now all the tones of the prism to the mere two colors that had iridesced at the beginning and making them sing. And one remained in a silent ecstasy, as if a single gesture would have imperilled the delicious, frail presence which one wished to go on admiring for as long as it lasted and which would in a moment disappear. (Matinee chez la Princesse de Guermantes (the rough drafts for Time Regained), ed. Henri Bonnet (Paris: Gallimard, 1982) (quoted in Nanttiez, 28)

Nattiez shows more Parsifal inspirations:

This Wagner emerges as a principal source of Proust’s thinking. He provides him with a mirror image of his own poietics and–in a slightly narcissistic way–of a creative alter ego; moreover, he supplies him, at an earlier stage in the genesis of the novel, with a work which tells of a quest analogous to that of A la recherche and which could, by association, be the work that inspires the Narrator’s revelation of the absolute. In his notes of 1913-1916 Proust writes: ‘I shall present the discover of Time regained in the sensations induced by the spoon, the tea, etc., as an illumination à la Parsifal’ (MPG:318).

The psychological progression embodied in A la recherche parallels that of Parsifal. It is no accident that, as we have seen, the idea of the ‘blossoming girls’ was already present at the time of Contre Sainte-Beuve. The Narrator is delayed in his quest by the girls just as Parsifal is by Flower Maidens. Thus there is no doubt whatever, in my view, that the passages of Within a Budding Grove in which Proust describes girls in terms of flowers were inspired by Wagner. Swann, like Amfortas, has let himself be trapped in the snares of love. Does not Proust associate Odette–and, with her, all the other temptresses, her daughter Gilberte, Mme de Guermantes, Albertine–with Kundry, the prisoner of the magician Klingsor, when he writes, shortly before the ‘transmission’ scene: ‘I should have been less ill at ease in a magician’s cave than in this little waiting room where the fire appeared to me the be performing alchemical transmutations as in Klingsor’s laboratory’ (WBG, I 567-8)?  It is only when the Narrator succeeds in passing beyond the illusions of romantic love, particularly after the distressing experience of Albertine’s kiss (G,II: 379), that he can gain access to the revelation, just as Parsifal, after being kissed by Kundry, is able to comprehend the mystery of the Grail and succeed where Amfortas has failed. Parsifal attains to perfect understanding at the time of the Good Friday spell; the Narrator, when listening to the Septet. Parsifal is able to enter Monsalvat, led by Gurnemanz; the Narrator, the library of the Princesse de Guermantes. Wagner laid great stress upon the ascent to the Grail, symbolised by the visible unrolling of the scenery in the first, 1882 production; and in Proust the episode of the uneven paving-stones in the courtyard, leading to the illumination in the library, comes precisely at the end of a long walk in Paris.

The name Swann, which ‘had for me become almost mythological’ (S, I:157), was surely not chosen by accident, so close is it to the German Schwann. As Rouisset has emphasised (1962:149), the Narrator, having had to choose between the Swann/Charlus pair and the Elstir/Vinteuil pair, sides decisively with the creative artists. He ‘eliminates once and for all Swann and Charlus, who lived on in him and threatened to make him sterile’; just as  Parsifal kills the swan the hunt for which has led him to Monsalvat, where he will experience a revelation, so the Narrator stops following in the footsteps of Swann only to be confronted, in Swann’s house, by the Sonata that will lead him to artistic truth.

One is also struck by the close analogy between the reaction of the Narrator, exposed for the first time to the Sonata whose religious character has been carefully evoked in the course of the Saint-Euverte soirée,  and the reaction of Parsifal, who witnesses a ceremony which he does not understand. Proust was well acquainted with this scene. In that letter to Jacques Rivière (17 February 1914) about the unity of his work, he wrote: ‘It would be just as if a spectator who saw Parsifal, at the end of the first act, understanding nothing of the ceremony and being chased off by Gurnemanz, were to suppose that what Wagner had meant was that simplicity of heart leads to nothing.” Like Parsifal, A la recherche is a work whose hero is on a quest for redemption. But just as Amfortas fails the first time around, it is not Swann but the Narrator who will succeed. (Nattiez, 31-31)

Parsifal I

Several persons have identified Wagner’s Parsifal as the template for Search. In both a young man engages in an epic quest. We know that Proust first heard the opera after its copyright expired in 1914 (Wagner had forbidden its performance anywhere but at Bayreuth), either in person or by his telephone music service. But the score and libretto would have been available earlier and concert versions were performed across Europe.

I am struck by the number of echos of the opera found in the novel:

Parsifal’s mentor is Gurnemanz. Is this the medieval root of the Guermantes name?

Parsifal makes his entrance with a dead swan over his shoulder that he has shot with his bow. Swann?

The evil Klingsor fills the valley with flower-girls to tempt the knights. In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower?

But the clincher is Gurnemantz’ advice to Parsifal as he prepares to search for the spear: “Time here has become space.”

The Stones of Venice

I may be the last one to get the joke here, so excuse me if that is so. Marcel enters the Guermantes courtyard and trips over an uneven paving stone. He is flooded with a happy sensation, one that he quickly traces to standing on the uneven floor of the baptistery of St. Marks in Venice. The joke: John Ruskin, who Proust translated, was the author of The Stones of Venice, a study of Venetian architecture. Proust dedicates this definitive passage on unforced memory to Ruskin.

Revolving the gloomy thoughts which I have just recorded, I had entered the courtyard of the Guermantes mansion and in my absent-minded state I had failed to see a car which was coming towards me; the chauffeur gave a shout and I just had time to step out of the way, but as I moved sharply backwards I tripped against the uneven paving-stones in front of the coach-house. And at the moment when, recovering my balance, I put my foot on a stone which was slightly lower than its neighbor, all my discouragement vanished and in its place was that same happiness which at various epochs of my life had been given to me by the sight of trees which I had thought I recognised in the course of a drive near Balbec, by the sight of the twin steeples of Martinville, by the flavour of a madeleine dipped in tea, and by all those last works of Vinteuil had seemed to me to combine the quintessential character. Just as, at the moment when I tasted the madeleine, all anxiety about the future, all intellectual doubts had disappeared, so now those that a few seconds ago had assailed me on the subject of the reality of my literary gifts, the reality even of literature, were removed as if by magic.

…Every time that I merely repeated this physical movement, I achieved nothing; but if I succeeded, forgetting the Guermantes party, in recapturing what I had felt when I first placed my feet on the ground in this way, again the dazzling and indistinct vision fluttered near me, as if to say: “Seize me as I pass if you can, and try to solve the riddle of happiness which I set you.” and almost at once I recognised the vision: it was Venice, of which my efforts to describe it and the supposed snapshots taken by my memory had never told me anything, but which the sensation which I had once experienced as I stood upon the two uneven stones in the baptistery of St Marks’s had , recurring a moment ago, restored to me complete with all the other sensations linked on that day to that particular sensation, all of which had been waiting in their place–from which with imperious suddenness a chance happening had caused them to emerge–in the series of forgotten days. (VI,255-256)

Cattleyas

The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has a painting by Martin Johnson Heade titled Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle (ca. 1875-1890).

Cattleya Orchid, Two Hummingbirds and a Beetle

She found something ‘quaint’ in the shape of each of her Chinese ornaments, and also in her orchids, the cattleyas especially (these being, with chrysanthemums, her favourite flowers), because they had the supreme merit of not looking in the least like other flowers, but of being made, apparently, out of scraps of silk or satin. “It looks just as though it had been cut out of the lining of my cloak,” she said to Swann, pointing to an orchid, with a shade of respect in her voice for so ‘smart’ a flower, for this distinguished, unexpected sister whom nature had suddenly bestowed upon her, so far removed from her in the scale of existence, and yet so delicate, so refined, so much more worthy than many real women of admission to her drawing-room. As she drew his attention, now to the fiery-tongued dragons painted upon a bowl or stitched upon a fire-screen, now to a fleshy cluster of orchids, now to a dromedary of inlaid silver-work with ruby eyes, which kept company, upon her mantelpiece, with a toad carved in jade, she would pretend now to be shrinking from the ferocity of the monsters or laughing at their absurdity, now blushing at the indecency of the flowers, now carried away by an irresistible desire to run across and kiss the toad and dromedary, calling them ‘darlings.’ 

Proust, Marcel (2004-12-01). Swann’s Way (Kindle Locations 3730-3739). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

 

She had in her hand a bunch of cattleyas, and Swann could see, beneath the film of lace that covered her head, more of the same flowers fastened to a swansdown plume. She was wearing, under her cloak, a flowing gown of black velvet, caught up on one side so as to reveal a large triangular patch of her white silk skirt, with an ‘insertion,’ also of white silk, in the cleft of her low-necked bodice, in which were fastened a few more cattleyas. She had scarcely recovered from the shock which the sight of Swann had given her, when some obstacle made the horse start to one side. They were thrown forward from their seats; she uttered a cry, and fell back quivering and breathless. “It’s all right,” he assured her, “don’t be frightened.” And he slipped his arm round her shoulder, supporting her body against his own; then went on: “Whatever you do, don’t utter a word; just make a sign, yes or no, or you’ll be out of breath again. You won’t mind if I put the flowers straight on your bodice; the jolt has loosened them. I’m afraid of their dropping out; I’m just going to fasten them a little more securely.”

Proust, Marcel (2004-12-01). Swann’s Way (Kindle Locations 3923-3931). Public Domain Books. Kindle Edition.

Woolf and Proust on “The Little Phrase”

Virginia Woolf read Proust with a mix of delight and despair, despair over the point of writing when it had already been done so well (see Alain de Botton’s How Proust Can Improve Your Life). She eventually paused her reading of Proust and wrote, among other books, To the Lighthouse.  I came across this passage in that novel which has a strong echo of Proust. The use of “little phrase” is the immediate connection, but the surrounding prose seems also to echo Proust’s use of the little phrase to probe Swann’s interiority. But note also how she has let go of Proust, especially in the ethereally shifting point of view. 

This passage is set at the end of the day, while Mrs. Ramsay has a few moments of private time after having tended all day to the needs of her family and guests.

No, she thought, putting together some of the pictures he had cut out— a refrigerator, a mowing machine, a gentleman in evening dress— children never forget. For this reason, it was so important what one said, and what one did, and it was a relief when they went to bed. For now she need not think about anybody. She could be herself, by herself. And that was what now she often felt the need of—to think; well, not even to think. To be silent; to be alone. All the being and the doing, expansive, glittering, vocal, evaporated; and one shrunk, with a sense of solemnity, to being oneself, a wedge-shaped core of darkness, something invisible to others. Although she continued to knit, and sat upright, it was thus that she felt herself; and this self having shed its attachments was free for the strangest adventures. When life sank down for a moment, the range of experience seemed limitless. And to everybody there was always this sense of unlimited resources, she supposed; one after another, she, Lily, Augustus Carmichael, must feel, our apparitions, the things you know us by, are simply childish. Beneath it is all dark, it is all spreading, it is unfathomably deep; but now and again we rise to the surface and that is what you see us by. Her horizon seemed to her limitless. There were all the places she had not seen; the Indian plains; she felt herself pushing aside the thick leather curtain of a church in Rome. This core of darkness could go anywhere, for no one saw it. They could not stop it, she thought, exulting. There was freedom, there was peace, there was, most welcome of all, a summoning together, a resting on a platform of stability. Not as oneself did one find rest ever, in her experience (she accomplished here something dexterous with her needles) but as a wedge of darkness. Losing personality, one lost the fret, the hurry, the stir; and there rose to her lips always some exclamation of triumph over life when things came together in this peace, this rest, this eternity; and pausing there she looked out to meet that stroke of the Lighthouse, the long steady stroke, the last of the three, which was her stroke, for watching them in this mood always at this hour one could not help attaching oneself to one thing especially of the things one saw; and this thing, the long steady stroke, was her stroke. Often she found herself sitting and looking, sitting and looking, with her work in her hands until she became the thing she looked at—that light, for example. And it would lift up on it some little phrase or other which had been lying in her mind like that—”Children don’t forget, children don’t forget”—which she would repeat and begin adding to it, It will end, it will end, she said. It will come, it will come, when suddenly she added, We are in the hands of the Lord.

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting and met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light. It was odd, she thought, how if one was alone, one leant to inanimate things; trees, streams, flowers; felt they expressed one; felt they became one; felt they knew one, in a sense were one; felt an irrational tenderness thus (she looked at that long steady light) as for oneself. There rose, and she looked and looked with her needles suspended, there curled up off the floor of the mind, rose from the lake of one’s being, a mist, a bride to meet her lover.

What brought her to say that: “We are in the hands of the Lord?” she wondered. The insincerity slipping in among the truths roused her, annoyed her. She returned to her knitting again. How could any Lord have made this world? she asked. With her mind she had always seized the fact that there is no reason, order, justice: but suffering, death, the poor. There was no treachery too base for the world to commit; she knew that. No happiness lasted; she knew that. She knitted with firm composure, slightly pursing her lips and, without being aware of it, so stiffened and composed the lines of her face in a habit of sternness that when her husband passed, though he was chuckling at the thought that Hume, the philosopher, grown enormously fat, had stuck in a bog, he could not help noting, as he passed, the sternness at the heart of her beauty. It saddened him, and her remoteness pained him, and he felt, as he passed, that he could not protect her, and, when he reached the hedge, he was sad. He could do nothing to help her. He must stand by and watch her. Indeed, the infernal truth was, he made things worse for her. He was irritable—he was touchy. He had lost his temper over the Lighthouse. He looked into the hedge, into its intricacy, its darkness.

Woolf, Virginia (2008-10-24). To the Lighthouse (pp. 45-47). Oak Grove. Kindle Edition.