Lily's
Library
It's not a library, really, more of a reading room, but I was seduced by the alliteration...
January 22, 2000 Reading TO THE LIGHTHOUSE
by Virginia Woolf. I've read it several times before, but it never ceases to
amaze. I envy her command of the English language. We are not so well educated
today. Nor as disciplined, I think. Well, not me anyway.
Some of my favorites so far…I expect
most of the book will be underlined eventually.
"Strife,divisions, difference of opinion, prejudices twisted into the very fibre of being, oh that they should begin so early...It seemed to her such nonsense-inventing differences, when people, heaven knows, were different enough without that. The real differences, she thought, standing by the drawing room window, are enough, quite enough."
"For the great plateful of blue water was before her; the hoary Lighthouse, distant, austere, in the midst; and on the right, as far as the eye could see, fading and falling, in soft low pleats, the green sand dunes with the wild flowing grasses on them, which always seemed to be running away into some moon country, uninhabited of men."
"They became part of that unreal but penetrating and exciting universe which is the world seen through the eyes of love. The sky stuck to them; the birds sang through them. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsey bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsey sitting with James in the window and the cloud moving and the tree bending, how life, from being made up of little separate incidents which one lived one by one, became curled and whole like a wave which bore one up with it, there, with a dash on the beach."
A
little light reading to whet your appetite. A short piece from MONDAY OR TUESDAY.
Virginia
Woolf Links:
The Virginia
Woolf Society of Great Britain