The Waves

by Virginia Woolf

Let me pull myself out of these waters. But they heap themselves on me; they sweep me between their great shoulders; I am turned; I am tumbled; I am stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing.”

I shall be a clinger to the outsides of words all my life.

then it becomes clear that I am not one and simple, but complex and many.

“But who am I, who lean on this gate and watch my setter nose in a circle? I think sometimes (I am not twenty yet) I am not a woman, but the light that falls on this gate, on this ground. I am the seasons, I think sometimes, January, May, November; the mud, the mist, the dawn.

The wave breaks. I am the foam that sweeps and fills the uttermost rims of the rocks with whiteness;

To be myself (I note) I need the illumination of other people’s eyes, and therefore cannot be entirely sure what is my self. The authentics, like Louis, like Rhoda, exist most completely in solitude. They resent illumination, reduplication. They toss their pictures, once painted, face downward on the field.

I think of people to whom I could say things; Louis; Neville; Susan; Jinny and Rhoda. With them I am manysided. They retrieve me from darkness. We shall meet tonight, thank Heaven.

I see Louis, stone-carved, sculpturesque; Neville, scissor-cutting, exact; Susan with eyes like lumps of crystal; Jinny dancing like a flame, febrile, hot, over dry earth; and Rhoda the nymph of the fountain always wet.

without Percival there is no solidity. We are silhouettes, hollow phantoms moving mistily without a background.”

I see everything—except one thing—with complete clarity. That is my saving. That is what gives my suffering an unceasing excitement. That is what makes me dictate, even when I am silent. And since I am, in one respect, deluded, since the person is always changing, though not the desire, and I do not know in the morning by whom I shall sit at night, I am never stagnant; I rise from my worst disasters, I turn, I change.

When I cannot see words curling like rings of smoke round me I am in darkness—I am nothing.

For there is nothing to lay hold of. I am made and remade continually.

Come, pain, feed on me. Bury your fangs in my flesh. Tear me asunder. I sob, I sob.”

“I ask, if I shall never see you again and fix my eyes on that solidity, what form will our communication take? You have gone across the court, further and further, drawing finer and finer the thread between us. But you exist somewhere. Something of you remains.

“The still mood, the disembodied mood is on us,” said Rhoda, “and we enjoy this momentary alleviation (it is not often that one has no anxiety) when the walls of the mind become transparent.

“It is strange how the dead leap out on us at street corners, or in dreams.

For this is not one life; nor do I always know if I am man or woman, Bernard or Neville, Louis, Susan, Jinny or Rhoda—so strange is the contact of one with another.

And now I ask, ‘Who am I?’ I have been talking of Bernard, Neville, Jinny, Susan, Rhoda and Louis. Am I all of them? Am I one and distinct? I do not know. We sat here together. But now Percival is dead, and Rhoda is dead; we are divided; we are not here. Yet I cannot find any obstacle separating us. There is no division between me and them. As I talked I felt, ‘I am you.’ This difference we make so much of, this identity we so feverishly cherish, was overcome.