Behind the Cotton Wool

Lily Briscoe's declaration "It is finished" (208) refers to a number of things, one senses: the lighthouse voyage is finished, her painting is finished, your reading of the novel is finished. It all happens at the same time. Regarding the last of those three termini, you're to be congratulated! To read this novel at any time, much less during the pressures of an academic semester, is no easy task; I hope, though, that Woolf and To the Lighthouse yielded some rewards, and that you may have occasion to return to the novel again in the future. I know few novels come alive and comfort and nourish me -- and articulate my experience of life's big questions -- the way this one does. It's ultimately about feeling rather than story (similar in this regard, maybe, to our experience of those last paragraphs of Joyce's "The Dead"), I think, and if it works for you I think you really do find yourself aware of (and perhaps mesmerized by) the beauty, the profound questions, and the ineffable mysteries of existence. Maybe, then, the novel works on us similarly to those words Mrs. Ramsay recalls from the dinner party, which "began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed" (119). And all the while it seems so exquisitely calibrated between joy and melancholy (ah, yes, there's occasion for that word "bittersweet" yet again). I hope maybe you'll still be inclined to share some more reflective observations and conclusions about the novel in this space in the coming days.

Incidentally, this passage from Woolf's autobiographical book Moments of Being is worth contemplating, especially after some of those passages (about painting, about writing, about life) we reviewed from Part 3 of To the Lighthouse:

“And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me. It is the rapture I get when in writing I seem to be discovering what belongs to what; making a scene come right; making a character come together. From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we – I mean all human beings – are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock.”

As we prepare to part ways in a few weeks, I wish for you all -- both in the near and longer-term future -- that you find intimations of that "real thing behind appearances." Maybe even as you gather with family and friends later this week when you, too, will seek those moments when all become "conscious of making a party together in a hollow, on an island" (97) (and may there be some culinary equivalent of the Boeuf en Daube on your tables!).