in the middle a yellow and purple dish of fruit. What had she done with it, Mrs. Ramsay wondered, for Rose’s arrangement of the grapes and pears, of the horny pink-lined shell, of the bananas, made her think of a trophy fetched from the bottom of the sea, of Neptune’s banquet, of the bunch that hangs with vine leaves over the shoulder of Bacchus (in some picture), among the leopard skins and the torches lolloping red and gold. . . . Thus brought up suddenly into the light it seemed possessed of great size and depth, was like a world in which one could take one’s staff and climb hills, she
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I have frequently looked at scenes and imagined what it would be like to be inside it but at a different scale. So Mrs Ramsey imagines herself traversing the fruit as if was a collection of hills and imagines that Augustus is in his own imaginary world experiencing the bowl as a honeybee and this unites them as alternative see-ers of an identical real world scene.
