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06/01 – 12/01 – The Waves, Virginia Woolf:
The modernist masterpiece, and without having read it, and despite all interal 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.
Out on the face of a cliff, facing an wide, anonymous, northern ocean and exposed to the headwind: everything in you is blown about; cold bright sunshine; 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 parts. The characters — all so full of recognition that their lives simply come at them. That it is not in their power to control. 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.
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13/01 – 19/01 – Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke.
Almost a manifesto, and I underlined so much that what I left out might communicate more meaning. And it’s all just somehow stuff we always knew, deep down, somewhere in there. But it’s just brilliantly put — with venom and on ice. All the clarity of a crisp morning in winter. And a natural clarity — there is nothing digital about it. Rilke seems to have no artifice.
And at least a thousand useful heuristics, and ones to return to whilst alone. To help remember that “a work of art is good if it has arisen out of necessity”.