06/01 – 12/01 – The Waves, Virginia Woolf

Jack Yeats, The Poetic Morning

06/01 – 12/01 – The Waves, Virginia Woolf

The modernist masterpiece and without having read it, and despite all internal mental protest to the contrary, it turns out I’d never really understood what that term meant anyway. Somewhere between the anxiety of losing the past and an impulse to build the new. Impulse in the face of anxiety: that is modernism.

This book will leave you on the face of a cliff: facing an wide anonymous northern ocean and exposed to the headwind. Everything in you is blown about—there is cold bright sunshine; a passing shower—and the oil is stripped from your face. Where the past meant conformity—meant meeting standards and petit fours in warm cloisters—and where the new meant this cliff: this raw,and sometimes unintelligible experience of new. Not a stream but a river. And it’s terrifying in large parts. The characters—all so full of recognition that their lives simply come at them. That it does not appear to be in their power to control these things. Even for Bernard: who is clearly Woolfs’ write-in. And then setting all this upstream chaos against the never ending beating-on of time…

I’d love to write it gifted too, but I’m glad not to be her. 

I recommend Jack Yeats, The Poetic Morning with her.