"But this is what I see; this is what I see,"
I felt this about Mrs Dalloway, but it's struck me even more strongly with To The Lighthouse - this is a novel about life, and simply what it is to be alive (how strange and wonderful to be anything at all). It's about sadness and happiness, moments and eternity, stillness and change, solitude and merging, disconnectedness and communication, the spaces between people and what exists in those spaces. It's precise, detailed, dreamy, ethereal, undeniable.
Reading To The Lighthouse had me reflecting on my own life, and it's scattered with moments of recognition both acute and general; the novel constantly stopped me in my tracks, as over and over I hit passages which perfectly reflected my own thoughts and experiences of the world. It's not just the ideas themselves - it's the expression, too. For it gives expression to the world as presented to consciousness - a kind of phenomenology - while illuminating both, revealing the profound and essential connection between subjective experience and the world at large, and at the same time also making sense of how we come to terms with other people, also wandering through these thickets.
Some passages which particularly resonated:
I. They both smiled, standing there. They both felt a common hilarity, excited by the moving waves; and then by the swift cutting race of a sailing boat, which, having sliced a curve in the bay, stopped; shivered; let its sails drop down; and then, with a natural instinct to complete the picture, after this swift movement, both of them looked at the dunes far away, and instead of merriment came over them some sadness - because the thing was completed partly, and partly because distant views seem to outlast by a million years (Lily thought) the gazer and to be communing already with a sky which beholds an earth entirely at rest. (20)
II. How then did it work out, all this? How did one judge people, think of them? How did one add up this and that and conclude that it was liking one felt, or disliking? And to those words, what meaning attached, after all? Standing now, apparently transfixed, by the pear tree, impressions poured in upon her of those two men, and to follow her thought was like following a voice which speaks too quickly to be taken down by one's pencil, and the voice was her own voice saying without prompting undeniable, everlasting, contradictory things, so that even the fissures and humps on the bark of the pear tree were irrevocably fixed there for eternity. (24)
III. And, what was even more exciting, she felt, too, as she saw Mr. Ramsay bearing down and retreating, and Mrs. Ramsay 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 and threw one down with it, there, with a dash on the beach. (47)
IV. 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. (62)
V. And suddenly the meaning which, for no reason at all, as perhaps they are stepping out of the Tube or ringing a doorbell, descends on people, making them symbolical, making them representative, came upon them, and made them in the dusk standing, looking, the symbols of marriage, husband and wife. (72)
VI. The room (she looked round it) was very shabby. There was no beauty anywhere. She forbore to look at Mr. Tansley. Nothing seemed to have merged. They all sat separate. And the whole of the effort of merging and flowing and creating rested on her. (83)
VII. Everything seemed possible. Everything seemed right. Just now (but this cannot last, she thought, dissociating herself from the moment while they were all talking about boots) just now she had reached security; she hovered like a hawk suspended; like a flag floated in an element of joy which filled every nerve of her body fully and sweetly, not noisily, solemnly rather, for it arose, she thought, looking at them all eating there, from husband and children and friends; all of which rising in this profound stillness (she was helping William Bankes to one very small piece more, and peered into the depths of the earthenware pot) seemed now for no special reason to stay there like a smoke, like a fume rising upwards, holding them safe together. Nothing need be said; nothing could be said. There it was, all round them. It partook, she felt, carefully helping Mr. Bankes to a specially tender piece, of eternity; as she has already felt about something different once before that afternoon; there is a coherence in things, a stability; something, she meant, is immune from change, and shines out (she glanced at the window with its ripple of reflected lights) in the face of the flowing, the fleeting, the spectral, like a ruby; so that again tonight she had the feeling she had had once today, already, of peace, of rest. Of such moments, she thought, the thing is made that endures. (105)
Those are all from the first part of the novel, 'The Window', which figures, for it's in that first part that all of these seeds are planted. In the second, 'Time Passes', change descends and time does, indeed, pass; and in the third, 'The Lighthouse', a resolution is reached and one is left with the feeling that, as Mrs Ramsay exclaims somewhere, earlier, and in her mind, it is enough.
* * *
One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy. The problem might be solved after all.
[...]
Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.
* * *
A few notes:
- The reading of To The Lighthouse tempted me to change my own (still only in the planning stages) novel from first to third person voice, but I think that the temptation has passed, at least for the time being (perhaps re-reading some Murakami, or finally digging into Proust, will fortify me in that regard).
- The book was a gift from Penny years ago; I started on it at the time but bogged down about 30 pages in...I think that it's taken me all this time to get to the point where I can really begin to appreciate it; now, it's gone straight on to my list of favourites.
- It's taken me much longer to finish than is usual for me - more than a month, I think (goes without saying that I've read a lot else in that time, but even so...) - mainly because I wanted to give it my full attention whenever I was reading it, and really to savour it. Had twenty or so pages to go today (after a break of about a week), and thought that Christmas Day might be an appropriate date on which to finish it.
