The magic and randomness of the internet brought some Virginia Woolf into my life this weekend.
As I watched Mrs Dalloway, I also discovered two documentary films about the English writer.
Virginia was such a visionary, such an observer of her time, a feminist and a modern soul, able to feel compassion and understanding for those out of her class, in a time, the interwar era, when England was deeply rooted in rules and casts.
Many of her biographers describe that her personal pain, the loss of so many of her family members, from a young age, and her mental sufferance, were at the core of a sensitivity that produced the uniqueness of her writing. It seems strikingly obvious.
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We live in times when reading does not mean much for the vastest array of people. A time of technology and materialistic desire for objects and possession.
What does literature still mean in our societies, in our cultures? In a era when you don't even need to leave your home to watch movies, when the big screen has been replaced by Netflix, when music is listened to as a flux, from streaming online networks, when video and online games rule our teenagers' mental lives, when text messages and Snapchat have transformed our relationships and conversations into a every day more pressured lot of quickly drafted questions and even shorter replies...?
I'm not sure what literature means to you, but I'm sure it means more than ever to me.
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I remember a song, produced on the early 2000 in England, in which the featured vocalists of the collective Nitin Sawhney sang: "I think there's gonna be a backlash against technology"...
Here is a recording with lyrics:
Nitin Sawhney- "Street Guru"
That was about 15 years ago.
Still no backlash. Now we are talking about how robot will take our jobs and closing our borders to those in the most terrible sufferance in decades.
See this beautiful film:
'Skinship'
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How our obsession with technology could disrupt our human connections
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But people say there is something wrong with me for worrying about these issues, about our lifestyle. I should look for another job, think about bying a flat, get a driving licence. Get normal.
Well, I don't want to be normal if this is normal, never wanted to.
I want to keep on writing and to write about the world around me, the world we live in, about what doesn't work in it, and about the beauty we tend to forget to see.
Hence my infatuation today with Virginia Woolf... A century later, her interrogations are no less relevant. Visionary.
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Just want to share a few quotes, with the help of Brain Pickings:
Virginia Woolf on the Defiant Truthfulness of the Soul and Our Elemental Human Need for Communication
“Communication is health; communication is truth; communication is happiness. To share is our duty… if we are ignorant to say so; if we love our friends to let them know it.”
The locus of that soul and the value of its knowledge is what Virginia Woolf (January 25, 1882–March 28, 1941) — who was herself bedeviled by the paradox of the soul — explores in a beautiful long essay on the work and legacy of Montaigne, found in her classic Common Reader (public library).
Virginia wrote:
"This soul, or life within us, by no means agrees with the life outside us. If one has the courage to ask her what she thinks, she is always saying the very opposite to what other people say."
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Virginia Woolf on the Relationship Between Loneliness and Creativity
“If I could catch the feeling, I would; the feeling of the singing of the real world, as one is driven by loneliness and silence from the habitable world.”
In the late summer of 1928, a month before the publication of Orlando subverted stereotypes and revolutionized culture, 44-year-old Woolf found herself grappling once more with the yin-yang of loneliness and creation.
In a diary entry penned at Monk’s House — the countryside cottage she and her husband had bought in Sussex a decade earlier, where she crafted some of her most beloved works — she writes:
"Often down here I have entered into a sanctuary … of great agony once; and always some terror; so afraid one is of loneliness; of seeing to the bottom of the vessel. That is one of the experiences I have had here in some Augusts; and got then to a consciousness of what I call “reality”: a thing I see before me: something abstract; but residing in the downs or sky; beside which nothing matters; in which I shall rest and continue to exist. Reality I call it. And I fancy sometimes this is the most necessary thing to me: that which I seek. But who knows — once one takes a pen and writes? How difficult not to go making “reality” this and that, whereas it is one thing. Now perhaps this is my gift: this perhaps is what distinguishes me from other people: I think it may be rare to have so acute a sense of something like that — but again, who knows? I would like to express it too."
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Virginia Woolf on What Makes Love Last
“Real love,” wrote philosopher Alain Badiou in contemplating how we fall and stay in love, “is one that triumphs lastingly, sometimes painfully, over the hurdles erected by time, space and the world.” But what, exactly, adrenalizes that triumph, particularly against the tidal tedium of time that washes over any long-term relationship?
That’s what Virginia Woolf explores in a beautiful short passage from her diary. In an entry from the early fall of 1926, fourteen years into her unconventional marriage to Leonard, 44-year-old Woolf writes under the heading The married relation:
"Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its “dailiness.” All acuteness of a relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like this: life — say 4 days out of 7 — becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband and wife) forms which is all the fuller and more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy’s “moments of vision.” How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions?"
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